There is too much competition in this country and so the natural progression is to find a way to differentiate yourself by cutting costs, which inevitably leads to automation.

Too many people equals too much competition. It can't be avoided so long as our population remains where it is.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]There is nothing you can't do if you put your mind to it.
Nothing.[/center][/font][hr]

Now you've just got to say "manufacturing losses and robotics."

I've moved on to posting stuff about a "basic minimum income," which is inevitable, at least if we want to avoid an eventual "Hunger Games," scenario, a corporate Fascist State, with lots of goons in riot gear, controlling the "literally" unwashed masses.

A BMI solves a lot of the woes brought on by globalization and increasing robotics. I like to encourage people to not have children as well, as in truth we're just offering them up to fodder for the capitalism machine, and mostly it just chews them up and spits them out, if they aren't left just wandering around, outside of it somewhere.

Education is the key to relevance. Without knowledge, poor people are doomed.

But their trade deals are against free education, starting in 1995 they forbade it.

That can move offshore or to another nation and give America the middle finger. The owners have half the wealth of the world and now they want the rest of it!

Huge monster companies will be the death of us all.

more evenly among everyone who is part of the economy, just the opposite of the system we have now.

Bleak future, at best.

GOP Congress would go to their graves, rather then let a penny go to someone poor. It is their motto.

an entendre

I know the meaning of the original phrase. If you missed my terms then catch up. They are selling us all by the pound as meat. We are only worth that price to them. It is the lowest common denominator they know.

so "by the pound" has another meaning relative to them (their currency) that gets lost when applied to the US. "Selling America by the dollar" though doesn't have the same ring to it.

We just need to pay service jobs more than we do now.

The biggest difference was manufacturing jobs were easier to collectively organize, so what really needs to happen is the motivation needs to be there to form service unions and the legal roadblocks from making this happen need to come down.

When is the last time you spoke with a telephone operator, assembly line worker, and pretty soon fast food wooers will be replaced by machines.

OTOH most datacenters are being built by people who were flipping burgers a week ago. Lots of auto garages can't take new customers because they don't have enough people (and that's with the fact that most auto diagnosis is done by computer now). My brother is an electrician and IBEW literally can't man some of its jobs and is going and pulling people out of McDonalds for its apprenticeship program. Ditto plumbing. Skilled labor (meaning something that isn't automatable yet) will have an edge for another few decades.

Both a higher minimum wage and fewer obstacles to organizing the service industry

Does anyone think that co-operative workplaces would vote for 8 figure salaries while the rest get crumbs? Certainly not.
Does anyone think that worker owned co-operatives would vote to ship their jobs offshore?

We spend a significant, if not a majority of our time at the workplace, and, as it is now, it represents a majority of people living and working a majority of their lives in an undemocratic environment.

To be a real democracy, We need democratic co-operative workplaces.

I think that would be a good start.

I work in higher ed where lip service is paid to "shared governance" and even that is in constant jeopardy.

that is what I was going to pay.

My manufacturing job was making giant satellite dishes from 1993-95

My pay in 1995 was $5.40 an hour. Equivalent to $8.40 an hour today. I think I got some paid holidays, but otherwise the benefits kinda sucked. No such thing as paid sick leave. There was some kind of a 401K that I probably should have invested in, but I was 32 and not going to retire from there anyway (I originally thought I was going to work about 8 months and then my bookstore would support me). After one year of work I got one week of vacation. I cannot remember the health insurance options, the employer did not pay much if it existed, so I never had it.

I also had several manufacturing jobs (3) from 1998 to 2001 - always as a TEMP. Yeah, generally lousy pay and no benefits there either. Although the $8.50 an hour in 2001 is equal to $11.38 today (I had one of the better paying temp jobs, others were making only $7.25) (still $9.71 is not the worst, but it is not all that either)

Yes, there were some manufacturing jobs that were unionized and had decent pay and benefits, but certainly not all of them. A lot of jobs in manufacturing are back breaking drudgery. In many cases, those are the jobs that get automated and I'm so sure that's a bad thing.

Most of our clothing is made in other countries now. Sewing, especially in a factory setting, just isn't a skill anyone in the US learns any more.

So instead of expecting manufacturing jobs to come back, we need to figure out the jobs that can and will be done here and pay a living wage for them. We also need to move away from a growth based economy. We can't grow sustainably forever, nor should we try to.

They did, though (at least in the 50s) pay decently enough to support a family. IEven the cleaner assembly jobs that we used to have in Silicon Valley in the 70s were repetitious. If manufacturing returns in a big way, it will be more automated and require fewer but more skilled workers. Which brings us to the whole population problem...

rather than something in the nature of the job itself. There's no reason we can't make service jobs pay like that as well.

Other than that they were dirty, dangerous, mind numbing, and repetitive.

We can solve the paycheck problem by doubling the minimum wage. Mechanization is going to put fewer people onto a factory floor, so service jobs like retail and restaurant are going to be it for a while. We need to reconnect work and remuneration and figure out how to claw back all the money they stole from the 0.1%.

Clearly, we need to determine how to help people displaced by automation, computers, internet commerce, etc.

The 538 piece is just another pile of Third Way crap in my view. Sure, automation is an issue, but jobs are required to design, build, operate and maintain automatics/robotics; and not all manufacturing jobs can be efficiently automated.

This is all just a simple matter of putting people and their dignity/well-being first.

Ignore it at your peril.

Manufacturing today isn't what it was 50 years ago. Manufacturing today is a capital and technology intensive enterprise; labor is a shrinking part of the process. This isn't a made-up story, it's a real, long-term, trend that's driven by a variety of economic and technological forces.

How we respond to it is what's important. Denial is not a good option.

You are making excuses for our society. Unnecessary, not acceptable, and potentially harmful if not recognized and corrected timely.

Nothing is what it was 50 years ago. Callous economic policy in the name of either greed or Third Way international idealism doesn't need to be reality.

Automation is real, yes, and how we respond is important. But that doesn't mean outsourcing was not and is not a problem. Denying that is not a good option either.

I don't get the "making excuses" charge. I was probably too curt in my response, but I stand by the gist of it, which is that we are not going to gear up for a 1950s style manufacturing economy that employs huge numbers of factory and assembly line workers.

We need to reimagine a radically different way of life. That's what I think. I don't know exactly what that is but I think it's coming whether we're ready or not.

I think we've reached a breaking point with technological capitalism.

I dont know the solution but clearly we need to figure this out or we all end up being replaced by a computer program.

Disclaimer: I am a software engineer.

Seems that no one is immune to the boom in automation

It's rather disturbing but how to deal with it is the question? We cant stop progress.

I will watch the rest of that vid later... it looks interesting. Thanks for posting.

We may very well come to the point where enough things are automated that there's not enough paid jobs to go around, but at the same time, the automation enables the economy as a whole to hum along well enough that there's enough money around to keep everyone fed.

Also, I think the last frontier for computers and AI will be the creative pursuits. Eventually, AI will be able to make art, movies, music, stories, etc., but they can't do that yet.

Learn some creative pursuits. They may be all we have left.

The oligarchs will fight that notion tooth and nail.

After all, if we can automate most production and still provide for everyone then perhaps some form of socialism is possible though not like Marx, Lenin or anyone really envisioned. Just a thought.

And it's not about who pays as you might expect. There will always be plenty who seek and generate excess taxable income.


It's about how you control the birth rate. Economic distress, in developed nations at least, is a constraint to planned procreation. How many millions of responsible people say "I'd like a baby but cannot afford to raise one"? Now imagine that constraint gone.

on a personal level to drop the birth rate.

The places with the highest birthrate now are those with the lowest living standards in place, contrasted with the Scandinavian countries, which have a low birthrate and they even provide a gift box for every newborn, with 100 dollars or more in stuff, including the box itself, as a free gift from the government, every year. Not to mention they are generally generous welfare states, you would think birthrates would go through the roof, but they don't.

Birthrates also decrease as income and education increase.

I think it started when the Japanese car companies began manufacturing in the US, and brought their automated robots to do most of the work that human US autoworkers were doing.

I believe at one time there were a million if not several million US autoworkers. Now, we measure them in the low hundreds of thousands as auto manufacturing is mostly automated.

Let's say an auto-worker robot costs $100K to implement. It can work 24 hours a day, every day, for a year. It can also work at 3 or 4 times the pace of a US worker.

That means that $100K robot, in a year's time, can perform the same work of at least 9 human autoworkers. Let's say each human autoworker gets a salary of $50,000 per year. The auto company is faced with one robot costing $100K, with say, $20K in maintenance and electricity, versus $450K or more in human labor. It isn't difficult to see which one the company would choose.


The same thing happened with a lot of manufacturing. It became automated.

It helped because they could manufacture items much more efficiently, with much fewer defects.

However, it hurt, because at least half the manufacturing jobs in the US were lost due to automation.

Automation has also decreased the influence of unions, because machines can't unionize.


Yes, a lot of people like to blame NAFTA for the loss of manufacturing jobs, but it really was automation that was the "killer" regarding US human manufacturing jobs.

NAFTA was simply the cherry, or whipped cream, on top of the automation cake/pie.

NAFTA doesn't explain the loss of manufacturing to Asia which is where most of the manufacturing was exported.

I don't think you can credibly say that NAFTA and free trade agreements have been harmless re: jobs. Asia? What do you think is driving TPP?

NAFTA means NORTH AMERICAN Free Trade Agreement.

How does something that is for North America affect Asia?

Now, one can say that parts of TPP allow free trade with Asia the same way NAFTA allows free trade with North American countries.

I was simply pointing out that free trade agreements in general have resulted in job losses here -- whether NAFTA or any other. As for, Asia -- you brought that into the discussion. And again, I was only pointing out what I see as obvious -- the TPP helps solidify the migration of jobs to Asia. As Asian economies have strengthened in response to manufacturing/export tied to ultra-cheap labor, labor surplus has declined in Asia resulting in wage expansion. Now do you see the connection? TPP serves to offset wage expansion with unfair free trade.

Yes, there would be less jobs because of automation. The fact that our workers are being put in direct competition with workers in other countries that are making a great deal less than even our minimum wage, means that there is substantial downward pressure on wages here. This is contributing to income inequality.

But there is no question that free trade agreements have affected jobs -- automation has as well, but to say that all outsources jobs would have been automated or will be automated if they are returned states-side, is baloney. Some tasks lend themselves well to automation, but not every single task. And automation in itself creates a major category of jobs.

This article is Third Way bullshit -- don't believe it. Any jobs created by returning manufacturing to the US is better than none or continuing to ship the overseas.

How do we get around the fact that this country is competing in a global economy where wages are lower in many places such as Asia?
And where "made in America" means nothing to the average U.S. consumer?

Tariffs and other protectionist measures?

You want to work in today's economy and make anything resembling real money, you can't do it with the old fashioned learn-to-slap-things-together-in-a-station assembly line job.

You've got to learn programming. You've got to learn technology.

Granted, even those jobs are being outsourced to China and India, but companies are finding that much of the time, the quality of outsourced coding work leaves something to be desired. There's advantages to having a tech team here in the U.S., say, using the Agile methods, doing scrums, and having face time to work with them to put together the software you need.

If it doesn't work well to ship the job to India, just bring the programmers here. What, develop our own people? Nah, too much trouble when I can hire someone under indentured servant terms so I can control them better.

That's how it works at some companies.

people should embrace technology- I'm a musician involved in music production and I can say that learning how to use technology has helped me to have a good career- creativity is still important of course but I tell anyone who asks me where to start, to learn how to use computers and music production software. I'm sure it's the same in a lot of businesses

For example, Bethlehem Steel has been transformed into a casino complex and shopping mall.

Who makes the uniforms, the cards, the ... ?

Those are jobs.

Yeah those are jobs in China.

IGT is the largest sole supplier, they produce about 1/2 of all the machines used at casinos one the US, WMS (a subsidiary of Scientific Games Corp.) still has several big poker games, and VDT has been increasing their products lately.

Strange at it may seem, slot machines are one manufacturing job the us has retained and expanded on.

Put the pieces that came from someplace other than the US in one pile and the US ones in another,

you are saying that the US pile would be bigger?

That even the screens are made in the US, along with the computer components? And all those flashing lights?

Nope, don't believe it.

Green updates and raising the minimum wage are all workable.

Every 20 to 30 years, there is a paradigm shift as new technologies and industries create jobs to offset the jobs lost due to their advancement.

he wanted a big mine near the shores of lake superior. people desperate for jobs agreed. trouble was, the mine would have been almost fully automated. it wouldnt have even been controlled locally. i think the net job gain in the area was less than 10.

May illustrate that he was paying attention at his former job with the Wall Street Journal.

Bottom line is---bringing jobs home is creating jobs and Casselman cleverly is forgetting about all the non-production work created by a business. A business brought back to the US creates an entirely new supply chain. Supplies, shipping needs, raw materials, machine parts, etc would generally be more locally sourced; creating work outside of the business itself. Imported goods would still need to be transported through the US, creating work. Local restaurants, hotels, stores, also benefit from nearby businesses. Workers need to get back & forth from work which is good business for auto dealers & transit services. Businesses need to be regulated which similarly increases work in the larger society. All of this increased work typically means more money in the hands of people who spend 100% of their paychecks thus creating maximum economic activity.

Put out by people that have no clue about manufacturing. We have had automated warehouses since the 80's. The US is actually down the list in countries adopting automation. Amazon is planning to hire 1000 people here. This writer obviously has no clue about manufacturing in America.
http://www.startribune.com/amazon-plans-to-employ-1-000-at-new-distribution-center-in-shakopee/300852681/

eom

Obviously they are not paying skimp wages to their people. Even if it is only 500 jobs it is still 500 more than we had before and all the jobs that we have as a result of building in the U.S is good. There are suppliers that manufacturers use and the tax base is enriched, so basically shut up 538.com

While a robot may take away 4 or 5 jobs that humans once did, it creates almost an equal amount of jobs (although maybe not at the same salary) in supply and maintenance.

So, a robot replaces 4 humans earning $50,000 each.

However, there may be 4 jobs created to service robots and technology, but they pay $36,000 each.

Germany maintained a strong labor force. Unemployment and financial strife in that country have contributed to historic problems heaven knows. However they're managing to keep high labor costs and unions I commend them, since post war conditions could have been bypassed some time ago. Maybe some of it is based on their well known work ethos.

Oh yeah, Wall Street Journal and business journals in articles justifying outsourcing and offshoring.

Saying that reopening a factory because it would only create 500 jobs is a bad idea is ridiculous.

It's 500 jobs. Not to mention all the support requirements for that factory and those 500 jobs.

People are needed to rebuild and retool those factories. Those are jobs.

People are needed to move the materials to and from the factories. Those are jobs.

Transportation facilities to and from those factories are jobs.

Educating the workforce to deal with modern manufacturing are jobs.

"Ben Casselman is FiveThirtyEight’s chief economics writer."

Based on his bio (previous reporter for the WSJ) I don't think Ben knows what all those thingies are under the hood of his car do and where they all come from. Not to mention the appliances in his house.

Economics my a...

538 says Clinton will win so I guess taking that into consideration them saying manufacturing jobs are not coming back would be correct.

How long before we go totally third world?

Jack in the Box, and Carl's Jr.

You go in, and push a touchscreen to order. Then once done, it tells you the amount owed. You put in your dollars, or swipe a debit/credit card.

It then spits out a receipt with an order number.

You then wait for your number to be called and pick up your order.

There are still humans making and cooking the food, but it seems only a matter of time before they have pre-made food just ready to heat.

If Amazon can use robots to move and select the right items, then transport them to box up and ship, it will be a few years before you have a robot retrieve food from a shelf or cold unit, heat it up for a few minutes in a microwave, and then only a human will be there to package it and give it to the customer.

their widespread us is cost.

If the minimum wage gets to the point were these bots are cost effective, you will be seeing them in those markets.

That said, with the bot...your order wouldn't get f'd up...

custom order your burgers.

I do it frequently, ordering Whoppers with extra everything.

Some people may want their burgers with no onions or no tomatoes. Or for various reasons, want the mayo left out.

Computer generated news articles are common. If a computer can write a news article, how about ad copy. They already write almost all of our junk mail.
We are at the beginning of robots who can clean rooms.
Carls Jr. is fully automating its kitchen. It will move up from there.
If a bot can have sex, it can wait on tables, sell perfume.
Computers are better at diagnosing and treating patients than doctors.

The nature of work is changing.

I am a critic of the failed system aka: capitalism

Reads like inverse capitalist socialism...

So people vote against having machines in to do a human job? Investors pull their money and put it somewhere else, as is their right. Why pay more than you need when you can buy a machine to do it cheaply? LFace it, everyone reading this forum is using a computer made out of parts that were largely built by machine with very little human intervention.

You can't legislate against the use of a general technology like automation any more than you can legislate against telecommunications or computerization, and frankly it's kind of ridiculous to be talking on the internet about voting away automation, when the internet is probably the largest automated system that has ever existed. Do you think we should go back to having DU forum messages transcribed by human typists in response to dictation over manually routed telephone lines? No, I didn't think so.

are made in a process that humans can't do. The chemicals involved aren't human friendly and are extremely dangerous. The accuracy involved is also beyond human abilities. What humans can do is build the machines that automate the process. That is a lot of manufacturing as the machines wear out quickly and constant advances in technology require new machines all the time. It used to be in the biz, now I'm into the water machines. We just automated the machine for drilling electrical enclosures. The automation did not replace workers, it only improved quality.

For example, IT sector jobs.

Every job given to an H1B visa holder, is a job not open to an American.

We may not have manufacturing jobs in the numbers we did before, but there are a shitload of IT jobs that Americans can be trained to do - even without programming skills. The thing is, those with aptitude need to be able to move on to more advanced programming jobs. That opens up the entry level jobs for those workers who might have been employed in the manufacturing sector. But it can't happen if companies have financial incentives to hire foreigners instead of developing American workers from within.

I sat on the bd. of directors of a non-profit that repped automotive suppliers in the midwest. We came to that conclusion in 2000.

They were the only industrial countries to gain manufacturing jobs during that decade. The UK lost 31%, Japan 15%, South Korea 17% and Germany 24%.

In the decade from 2001 -1010 things changed. No developed countries gained manufacturing jobs. The smallest loss was in South Korea at 5%, Germany 10%, Canada 22%, the US 24%, Sweden 27% and the UK 28%.

From 1991 to 2012 the US was in the middle of the rankings of manufacturing jobs losses (while manufacturing output soared in all countries). The biggest loser was the UK at 51%, followed by Sweden at 39%, Japan at 33%, Germany and France at 30%. The US came in at 24% followed by South Korea at 20%, Italy 11% and the best was Canada which only lost 6% of its manufacturing jobs from 1991 to 2012.

https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/IN10109.pdf

...so no one will read it or believe it.

cleanup initiative. Those would provide millions of jobs.

Lest their political enemies, whether actual or perceived, be economically nourished and vitalized enough to organize resistance to them.

and is not an example of manufacturing jobs.

Amazon has added a bunch of 500,000 sq ft warehouses in the past few years.

30 to 40 years ago, such an expansion would have also added thousands of jobs to work in those warehouses.

Now, it adds just several hundred.

And its first example is a distribution center. We use industrial robots and automation. Before we started using them we employed about 35 people, today we employ 110. So, I question the whole premise.

Note that he considers the Wall Street-funded "Progressive" Policy Institute's advocation of "less regulation, lower corporate tax rates and a shift away from taxing income and toward taxing spending" to be "not necessarily bad as economic policy".

And it's only going to get "worse." If our economy was structured differently, increased efficiency would be viewed as a blessing, not a curse. Increased efficiency could be used to increase the standard of living, to reduce the length of work weeks and working careers. It could free us to transition to more environmentally sustainable means of production.

"Bringing back manufacturing" is worthwhile but will not restore the majority of lost jobs or the wages they once commanded. The gains from the efficiency of manufacturing need to be shared with the workforce and society as a whole.

Albeit implied, it's there.

The environment would sure benefit.

The topic is of course very contentious, but there is a lot of wishful thinking pining after the jobs that used to be ("Make America Great Again&quot .

At the same time there is enormous pressure from huge corporations, pressure exerted all over the globe, and this must be resisted. Corporate pressure must be resisted effectively and realistically.

Fundamentally, North American labor and business must be forward looking (ex. solar industries, green, white collar, high tech but not forgetting "high touch": highly skilled trades) and progressive (raise minimum wage, provide good benefits, provide lots of training and retraining).

This even more fundamentally means excellent education. No Jesus rode the dinosaur. No "teach to the test". Downgrading heavy-handed and narrow teacher oversight (NCLBehind) while maintaining high standards and allowing for inspirational and highly effective / committed teachers to flourish. Lessen the crushing student debt burden.

This much should be obvious.

any time soon. Nor should they.

when we are as cheap and exploited as they are

First, how many billions of factory jobs are we actually talking about? How many suffering 3rd world factory workers are making our clothes, our shoes, our furniture parts, our car parts, our computer and communications equipment? They claim it's in the millions but our parts have been manufactured overseas for a long time and no one counts those jobs. Every time I read one of these "free" trade writers who claim the jobs are being taken over by robots, I have to laugh at their naivety. There are millions and millions and millions of workers in poor destitute areas slaving away for you but you can't see them, and no one counts them. They are hidden and no one, the least of which are free traders who are trying to convince you of the wonders of globalization, is talking about all those hidden jobs that get moved when factories get moved. No the jobs are there, you just can't see the poor and suffering who are doing them so if you can't see them, they don't count.

Second, robotics are too expensive, clumsy, unnecessary and just NOT that advanced. Global warming is going to flood most of New York and Florida before anything resembling a truly human functioning robot is developed. Hell they can't even invent a machine that picks fruit without creating huge amounts of damage, waste and dust. We still have thousands of underpaid foreign workers crossing our borders to harvest most of our fruits and vegetables and doing our computer programming. No, robots are not coming anytime soon because human labor is still too cheap. As long as you can rent a person for $7.25 an hour or less, usually less, you are not going to see robots being developed to replace them. Talk to me when renting a person costs you over $50 an hour, then maybe robotics will see a boom. Necessity is the mother of invention and there is no necessity for robot workers when humans ones are so cheap.

Besides if/when robotics become common place, they will need to be manufactured, cleaned, repaired, energized (or fed), synchronized, balanced and programmed. That's a lot of work and self-repairing robots aren't even in the works yet.

90% of the US population was involved in farming in 1790, which is to say a farming family produced only a little more food than they needed back then. Draft animals, better plows, then tractors, then a whole myriad of huge expensive harvesters and combines and so forth...the percentage dropped steeply and steadily for two centuries down to a current 2.5% or so. Each farming family nowadays produces enough for about 200 families.

And based on the economy of more efficient production, food costs have followed steadily down. If you think about what people did instead of farming, when so many farmers were no longer necessary, think about the boom in production of material goods - people wanted stuff. If you imagine a day when so many people aren't needed to produce all those material goods any more, think - what else do people want.

They were involved in farming because they chose to be. Home and the land were mini factories. The way you made your living was with the land. No Land no wealth. People did not move to the cities by choice. They original moved there because they had no land to live on. They later moved there because the factories needed them and by under valuing agriculture products, the capitalists could get cheap workers to fill their factories. They at 1st took the dredges of society, children, women, girls, Irish or the most recent immigration or minority group, the poor were the first people to be lured to the factories and into the cities. You can NOT run factories if you have to hunt down workers scattered among the rural populations. You had to get them off the farms.

They got people off the farms by lowering the price of farm products. If they undervalued what a person can make off the land, then those people and their children had to look elsewhere to earn a living. And the factories and the capitalist were all waiting to take advantage of them.

Yes, now you have tractors that can dig and plant (though "NO Plow" is making those machine obsolete) but they can't pick grapes, they can't harvest sun ripen tomatoes or collect flowers or pick peaches and plums. They don't even do a very good job of planting seeds without waste. The huge house sized combines used today are used mostly on grain crops - corn, wheat, soybeans. Crops that corporate farms export. Crops that are hard and hold up when moved around like luggage.

I'm sure there are a few specialized machines that can harvest (beans and unripe tomatoes) but mostly they can only do it on green hard fruits and vegetables. Delicate and tender produce, odd sized vegetables and crops with indeterminate harvest times still have to be picked by hand.

I question the efficiency of today's food production. Today we import as much food as we export. Wouldn't a more efficient system be to sell the food we grow on nearby farms to nearby people? Why are we wasting so much energy moving food around to different parts of the world and yet people still go without enough to eat. How is that efficient? Why are we growing so much corn, wheat and soybeans when most people in the US don't buy those items in vast quantities? So, they have to be exported or sold to processors. Why don't we have a national farm plan that makes sure the food we buy is grown here? It seems to me we have a very inefficient system of farming that has no common sense..

Some foods have gone down in price but some foods are still very expensive. If you want tasteless chewy carrots and bland fruits grown in baths of chemicals you can get them fairly cheap. If you want sugar drenched carbs with saw dust added for fiber you can get them fairly cheap. But if you want food that isn't drenched in chemicals, wont make you fat and that tastes good it can be very expensive. That's why niche farming and small farms are making a come back. The food people want to eat is going up in price and you can making a living off your land again.

But really, I run a small organic farm and there aren't any machines that can do two thirds of what I need done - wish there were, I would buy them. I have to hire people or do it myself. Those farm machines don't seem to be suited to small farm life. They are only useful for factory farmers who export their excessive over production of grains.

Or our flowers to Soth America. We are Not exporting our off season vegtables to anywhere.

What you see in that export/import graph is grains and soy beans exported by the ton and vegtables and fruit imported. Yes, some few other products ae being exported back and forth but not in the billions of dollars as shown in your graph. So, the US is has ever increaing tonnages of grains and soy beans being exported. Why? Why are we committed to over production of grains? And we are importing less. That's probably due to a move to buying local foods. But it is still way too much energy being expended so a few factory farms get rich.

Notice the title of you 2nd graph. It is only charting disposable income expenditures on food. Isn't food a necessity? Aren't we spending Non disposable income on food? The way Greenspan changed the way inflation was counted on food, it artificially makes it seem like we spend less.

Anyway, I can tell you on the small farm front, my compition has increased and more and more small farms are starting up. Now if the robotics craze would focus on small farm equipment, I could work more efficiently.

returned to this country is still better then 5000 being exported for good. Robotic machinery is not grown like corn from an organic source, how about we create more jobs by manufacturing that equipment in this country too? The idea that we can no longer maintain a manufacturing base due to competition from low wages in the Pacific rim is a false one, when countries like Germany can retain a solid manufacturing base while still paying workers a living wage.

language translation, transcription and speaking without sounding like a machine.

If we can get them to be good enough to fool people, then I'm pretty much done. Probably 5 years out, maybe 10. Hopefully I'll move on by then.

Now, it was not a terribly fancy writing job (I was abstracting journal articles for an index libraries use), which is pretty much exactly the kind of writing that software is best at (scan for keywords; pull topic sentences).

You see it in technical writing too; most programming languages now have an "auto-doc" feature which assembles complete documentation based on a few comments the programmer inserts into the source code. That said, Steve Wolfram is dedicating his life to making software better at this, and has come a long way already.

when they call.

I work for a Pharmacy Benefit Manager/Mail Order Pharmacy for their after hours team. There's a lot I can do, but none of it would be impossible for a computer to do if they were much better at speech recognition and able to believably fool people on the other line that they are a person.

Actually, funny story here, I take prescription reorders, just like many other mail order pharmacies, but I'm NOT a computer(I don't think). I had this one older lady call at like midnight to reorder prescriptions, it may have been because I was tired or she was, but the way I answered I guess made her think I was an automated line, so she started pushing in her prescription number and stuff into the phone. It was away from her ear, and I'm not sophisticated enough to translate those tones, but they deafened me. Had to practically scream into my headset that I'm not a computer and can she please talk to me. She apologized, we completed the order, but its kinda funny in hindsight, because of our expectations. I also get a lot of people, when they call for reorders, say in surprise that I'm not a machine, I've had a few ask for our automated line(which we don't have).

Most people are relieved to be talking to a person, and I can understand the frustration, despite the sophistication, there's something frustrating with navigating phone menus and listening to that damn monotone, even if it has more variety nowadays. It is slower than a person in many cases still, and the computers lack a flexibility to be able to understand what you want, if that makes sense. So that's my job security at this time.

But that's not the point.

The article is mostly accurate. It talks about long-term trends that are being driven by a variety of economic and technological forces. Manufacturing is increasingly a capital and technology intensive enterprise; labor is a shrinking part of the process. Like a lot of things, the genie isn't going back in the bottle, i.e., the trend is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Traditional manufacturing isn't going to employ huge numbers of workers in America as it once did.

I suppose the best way to look at it is as both a problem and an opportunity.

How we respond to it is what's important.

Best class I ever had, even with my disastrous mid-term project that absolutely failed at keeping an inverted pendulum up (I switched the proportional and integral terms by accident). It's really some of the coolest theory I've run across.

and marveled at it. It's very cool, but as you might imagine, it's not an application that comes up a lot in the types of machines we design. We've tried to guess how it senses the deflection. Feel free to stop by the office and see what we're working on if you're ever in Nashville, TN!

It sounds more and more like we're going to find out.

I'm all out of ideas then. Have to start collecting aluminum cans or something.

The Nate Silvers of the world are not the target market that is being affected here. Why do these dweebs feel the need to chime and analyze this without understanding the anger and frustration these folks feel?

Nothing is gained from writing this article, except further enflaming the division between the educated and the uneducated, white collar vs blue collar.

This shit breeds anti-intellectualism. Stupid stupid stupid.

Many are working with SMT PCB production, many engineers doing quite well. Why can't the same happen in the USA? Some major customers are from the USA.

That iPhone would be $15,000 instead of $500 to cover the cost of paying American workers a middle class wage to assemble.

This goes into it in depth:
I then called up Kyle Wiens, the CEO of electronics repair specialists iFixit, to get a ballpark estimate of just how much a US-assembled iPhone might cost consumers.

“Building [Apple products] in the US isn’t impossible, but a matter of whether or not consumers are willing to pay more for them,” iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens told me over the phone. Doing some back-of-the-envelope math, Wiens said that consumers could pay around $50 more for an iPhone that was assembled in the US versus one that was assembled in China.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-much-would-donald-trumps-american-made-iphone-actually-cost

Lord knows those i-Phone buyers don't have an extra $50....

To build iPhones in the U.S. you would need to build a supply chain which won't be easy since most of the supply is out of Asia. You would need to hire the same number of workers here in the U.S. and re-train them to work in Apple. Apple would not be able to post the jobs on Monster.com and get the exact same number of workers. You would have to pay the U.S. workers a middle class wage, not a Chinese wage, not a U.S. min. wage, but a U.S. middle class wage, $17/hr or higher.

That's just off the top of my head.

for 25 cents?



Just poking at Wal-Mart shoppers here.

Should have included that in my response above.