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Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

nytimes.com

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Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#141

Post by JDiculous »

jfoutz wrote: post #35

Politicians are amateurs. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circumstances. If you pick a random politician, and ask them to design a transmission, or perform open heart surgery, they'd do as poorly as you or me. Yes, there are politicians from all walks of life, and you can probably find a surgeon politician. In general, the…

How do we fix this?

Here's an idea - direct democracy where one can only vote on a topic that he/she has proven a minimal set of competence in. This could be in the form of an exam on a topic (eg. economics) and/or logic test. The goal is that one should not be allowed to vote on something like climate change without knowing the science and data behind climate change.

We need to acknowledge that the world is too complex for one person to know what's best for everyone on every single topic. Our system of representatives is totally outdated now that we have the internet.

The beauty of direct democracy is that it removes the politicians. As long as there are politicians, there will always be corruption (eg. bribery).

Ideally of course we'd have AI deciding our best course of action because humans are inherently biased, but that's further down the road.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#142

Post by prewett »

superuser2 wrote: post #8

This is a great article. The rage of the blue-collar masses is misplaced. It belongs with engineers, STEM people, operations research, Taylorist management. Globalism isn't the architect of their fate. We are. Want enough work to go around? Ban the last 100 years of agricultural development. That'll create all the jobs you could possibly want, real fast. Except then you'all find out that more work to go around is a w…

The rage may be misplaced, but the rage is still valid. There is basically skilled jobs and minimum wage jobs. You are saying "they're misinformed" but they are not actually incorrect. So what do you suggest we do instead of focusing on manufacturing jobs?

(I would love to suggest something, unfortunately, I have zero ideas, and not sure where to get any ideas, frankly.)

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#143

Post by Noos »

dragonwriter wrote: post #51
macspoofing wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Service can literally be created out of thin air. Not really. It's built on manufacturing base. You need to 'service' something.

Lots of service are personal services (the thing you are servicing is the customer), and categories of personal service expand and contract with, essentially, fashion. Service can literally be created out of thin air.

They reach saturation in a local area quickly and tend to burn out quickly. They also tend these days to not even be year-round work.

Fireworks booths, Halloween shops, frozen yogurt franchises, "escape game" franchises, "curves" gyms targeted towards women, edible fruit arranged like flowers...a lot of service jobs have very short shelf lives, and can really only have one or two in a town.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#145

Post by vacri »

superuser2 wrote: post #8

This is a great article. The rage of the blue-collar masses is misplaced. It belongs with engineers, STEM people, operations research, Taylorist management. Globalism isn't the architect of their fate. We are. Want enough work to go around? Ban the last 100 years of agricultural development. That'll create all the jobs you could possibly want, real fast. Except then you'all find out that more work to go around is a w…

This is my favourite counter to millenials complaining about how booomers had jobs handed to them on a platter. "What, you want an unfulfilling factory job doing the same mundane thing day in, day out, probably on your feet, and probably without climate control? And if you're a woman, explicitly get paid less for it?"

The boomers may have had a higher employment rate, but they weren't design consultants and business analysts and so forth.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#147

Post by vacri »

Houshalter wrote: post #9
twblalock wrote: post #2

Last week's NYT article on free trade was pretty good: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/business/economy/more-weal... This is the bottom line on American manufacturing: > From 2000 to 2010, the United States lost some 5.6 million manufacturing jobs, by the government’s calculation. Only 13 percent of those job losses can be explained by trade, according to an analysis by the Center for Business and Economic Research…

But there aren't a finite number of factories. If more factory work gets automated, then it will reduce the cost of building more factories and producing even more goods. Whereas service jobs seem more finite. There is only a finite demand for burgers or shelf stockers, unless you increase the population. I really don't understand how a mostly service based economy is sustainable. In any case, the service based jobs…

It's really weird that you think there's an infinite demand for goods, but not an infinite demand for people to stock those goods on shelves.

Anyway, a 'service economy' doesn't mean unskilled drones working in back-of-house. It means having a substantial professional class.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#148

Post by euyyn »

joe_the_user wrote: post #129
euyyn wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on developer tools, with the explicit long-term goal to automate developers out of their job, and we need all hands we can get :)

1) Developer tools don't really eliminate jobs, not any time soon, not in way a robot can entirely eliminate a line welder position or a self-driving car could eliminate a taxi driver position. 2) Sure, you need all the hands you can get in the current market . Still, you wouldn't hire a ten thousand new developers tomorrow even if ten thousand people as competent as your most competent lead developers showed up on y…

The current market is precisely that there's so much low-hanging fruit in automating a developer job that we aren't going to entirely eliminate developer jobs any time soon; and hence why any new pair of hands helps.

The tech companies in SV told the Obama administration that if they gave a million more H1Bs to engineers, they'd hire them all. And plenty of them put resources on improving developer tools.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#149

Post by Noos »

bluedino wrote: post #99
hasbroslasher wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is real. I'm from a small town in Montana with a strong timber industry presence, and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. Often times, there's no choice because the kids didn't do well enough to go to "coastal school," nor could they or their parents afford it if they did. People from cities exhibit this kind o…

>> and loads of people stick around, largely because their parents want them to stay or because they don't want to leave everything they know. We've really fallen as Americans, too eager to stick in one place. 2-3 generations ago many of our ancestors left everything they had in their home country to come here with nothing more than the money in their pockets and shirt on their back.

Those Americans often suffered from homesickness so bad that it was possible to die from it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia#As_a_medical_conditi...

Homesickness: An American History by Susan J Matt is a great book about how it existed in America. The song "Home Sweet Home" is banal to us, but was forbidden to be played during the Civil War because it caused homesickness and desertions.They used to hospitalize people suffering from nostalgia. It could be that bad. the past was nothing like the modern rootlessness we have now.

Re: Why Are Politicians So Obsessed with Manufacturing?

#150

Post by maverick_iceman »

jfoutz wrote: post #35

Politicians are amateurs. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. Politicians are experts at politics, they can achieve consensus in seemingly impossible circumstances. If you pick a random politician, and ask them to design a transmission, or perform open heart surgery, they'd do as poorly as you or me. Yes, there are politicians from all walks of life, and you can probably find a surgeon politician. In general, the…

>and they should probably be handled by experts

That experiment was tried in Soviet Union. How did that end?

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