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America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

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Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#311

Post by chgs »

jimbokun wrote: post #106
llamaimperative wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.

Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services. That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less. (I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)

Rent suffers more from supply and demand because of artificial supply problems.

Wages have increased far more than the price of food over the last 200 years, wage rises aren’t inflationary on their own.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#312

Post by t-3 »

mercutio2 wrote: post #209
chrisco255 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is nowhere close to going to war with Canada. Tariffs are import taxes, not weapons of war. Good lord.

Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.

It's just a joke. A bad joke, but just a joke. Republicans are afraid to add Puerto Rico as a state for fear of it voting Democrat, they would never allow Canada to become a state even if you wanted to (or rather, 10 states), because they would never win an election again.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#313

Post by heavyset_go »

tartuffe78 wrote: post #2

Who will buy the phones when no one is paid to produce them? The cars? The food and the clothes? Wealth keeps concentrating upward, great leaps in efficiency and throughput, but I can't see how it's a sustainable model for continued consumption growth year after year.

Read the Plutonomy paper from CitiGroup circa 2005: https://delong.typepad.com/plutonomy-1.pdf

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#314

Post by piva00 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #184
piva00 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paranoia is the USA's way of life, when life always seems to be teetering on the edge of a cliff: losing your job at a moment's time, losing your life savings for a healthcare emergency, losing your kid to a school shooting, losing your stuff to burglars. Any of these have a very low chance of happening but they can be so life-changing that Americans seem to always be in some state of paranoia, a low-trust society wi…

Well if it's worked so well thus far, why change it up? I suspect that if a country is not at least a little paranoid about the competition that it doesn't stay #1 for long.

To me it's a problem of causality, does it actually made the USA be "#1" for long? Is it helping society to be this paranoid about everything and everyone?

I'm no sociologist to answer that but I question if it's a causal link or if it's more a case of "despite the", what if the USA could be doing better without the paranoia, maybe it's a drag and not a push... It surely seems to be dragging society down into a dark path.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#315

Post by badc0ffee »

chrisco255 wrote: post #260
mercutio2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling a sovereign nation, and the US’s closest ally, it should become the 51st US state isn’t making war, but it’s way more than imposing tariffs in contravention of treaties this president signed in his last term.

[flagged]

Canada isn't bound to the monarchy or to the UK. The king is just a figurehead, and the king's representative (the Governor General) is a powerless rubber stamp.

Now, to be clear, the (conceptual) figurehead is taken seriously. When the queen died, a great renaming happened, changing each province's court of queen's bench to the court of king's bench, Queen's Counsel are now called King's Counsel, and of course new currency is being minted with images of the king. But, none of that means the actual King Charles the person has any power at all.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#316

Post by FirmwareBurner »

scotty79 wrote: post #274
chii wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)? This video about Argentina's economic failures mentions why free market capitalism failed in argentina, and why a "similar" opening up in china didnt fail (but not so much detail that another country could follow it and replicate the success).…

Soviets might just really be bad at everything. Capitalism didn't work for them either.

What they got wasn't capitalism, it was kleptocracy.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#317

Post by pcthrowaway »

dttze wrote: post #29
markus_zhang wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI is probably going to happen I think. But I don't think it's going to achieve much. Yes it's going to give common people some foothold, but with automation and AI I really doubt we need that many jobs, and unemployment rate is going to be high anyway. The elites are going to throw UBI as a bone and then they can do whatever they want. And that's it -- A cyberpunk future where elites can pretty much ignore the comm…

This is the optimistic take. The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor. These elites in power are stupid, cruel, spiteful, and have no sense of decency.

> The reality is they will find some way to cull the unwanted poor.

I fear this is going to be achieved with a World War in the not-too-distant future.

Get rid of a lot of dissatisfied poor people and seize some more resources for the wealthy at the same time.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#318

Post by dzonga »

kranke155 wrote: post #306
mayama wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes these plans go so successfully, when the soviets have historically not been able to make such plans successful (despite being richer and more powerful at the time)? Soviets had more hardcore ideologues at helm most of the times until SU dissolution. They hardly allowed their ideology to be diluted without challenge, which made plans infeasible without real time feedback. China's Mao era was somewhat simi…

So China introduced market competition at the political level and at the economic level. And they did it while remaining authoritarian. Incredible.

highly meritocratic system all the way from bottom to top. incredible indeed. in china you start as a low level official managing a village, if you succeed - you're promoted to town etc. they keep detailed records of your performance in school from kindergarten and a comprehensive dossier is compiled to evaluated by party officials. that means you will never have a nincompoop in charge at any level.

maybe chinese nationals / or ccp members can correct or add some things.

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#319

Post by pcthrowaway »

jimbokun wrote: post #106
llamaimperative wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UBI won't fix much for a far more trivial and mechanistic reason: adding $1,000/mo to everyone's income merely gives landlords the ability to charge ($1,000*n bedrooms)/mo more in rent.

Applying it to rent is arbitrary. The general point is that it is inflationary for all goods and services. That is assuming UBI is funded through government borrowing as we saw with COVID stimulus. If funded through new taxes the inflationary impact should be much less. (I don’t have enough economic training to determine how much less.)

This is why UBI isn't a good solution to the massive glut of problems we're facing.

Which is why universal basic services[1] provide a much better solution, because they make it the government's problem to handle the logistics of creating or procuring the resources people will need.

But after decades of red scare, I don't have much faith the U.S. government will move in this direction, and even the working class may protest it due to how conditioned they are to reject anything they might associate with communism.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_services

Re: America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1

#320

Post by immibis »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #301
decimalenough wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCP under Xi has reverted to form after some temporary loosening up, but it's still way less autocratic than it was during the Mao era. Also, the CCP ultimately derives its legitimacy from materially improving the country for the Chinese people: back in the day fighting back against the Japanese and corrupt warlords, now economic progress. Both the Chinese people and the CCP know well what it means if they stop deliv…

[flagged]

Interesting tangent to bring up. How many people does America kill?
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