The 2012 US Election
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Voronwë the Faithful
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Where is my "Don't Blame Me I voted for Hillary" bumper sticker?
See? I told you all four years ago that Hillary was the right choice. She could have been the 1st woman president, she would be a strong leader, and we would have had the best womanizing economist on the planet right there next to her in the White House. And if all else failed we would have had Billary Part Deux!
Who cares if the country is going to hell in a hand basket? Think of the theater that we missed out on!
Oh you fools! I told you so!
See? I told you all four years ago that Hillary was the right choice. She could have been the 1st woman president, she would be a strong leader, and we would have had the best womanizing economist on the planet right there next to her in the White House. And if all else failed we would have had Billary Part Deux!
Who cares if the country is going to hell in a hand basket? Think of the theater that we missed out on!
Oh you fools! I told you so!
Our lab tech lives on her own planet. She knows there's an election on and she knows who the candidates are and who she's voting for but as far as what's in the news...no. So she tracks the debates through the memes. A couple weeks ago she asked me why Big Bird was all over her Facebook feed. This morning it was "What's with all the binders of women jokes?"
I guess the question for the candidates is is this really the way they want to be reaching the oblivious voters?
Also, is it a bad thing that I'm getting more laughs out of this new meme than the Big Bird one?
I guess the question for the candidates is is this really the way they want to be reaching the oblivious voters?
Also, is it a bad thing that I'm getting more laughs out of this new meme than the Big Bird one?
When you can do nothing what can you do?
If I see another talking head on tv talking about how Obama has ended the war in Afghanistan, I will probably have a thrombosis.
Obama won the election in 2008 after promising to end the "war" in Afghanistan. Leaving a country that you were "at war" with 6 years later does not constitute ending a war. Not in any way shape or form.
And certainly not in the manner in which it is playing out.
Obama won the election in 2008 after promising to end the "war" in Afghanistan. Leaving a country that you were "at war" with 6 years later does not constitute ending a war. Not in any way shape or form.
And certainly not in the manner in which it is playing out.
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Voronwë the Faithful
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You keep saying this, and it simply isn't true. What he said was that he would end the war in Iraq, and turn the attention back to the war in Afghanistan where the real fight should have been. I do not agree with the course that was taken, but it is not inconsistent with what President Obama said he would do as a candidate.Holbytla wrote:Obama won the election in 2008 after promising to end the "war" in Afghanistan.
Edit: Here is one of many articles, from your home paper: Obama: Afghanistan, not Iraq, should be focus
Last edited by Voronwë the Faithful on Thu Oct 18, 2012 3:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
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axordil
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The jobs problem is more complex than offshoring. It simply takes fewer people to farm a thousand bushels of wheat, or mine a thousand tons of car, or push a thousand cars off the assembly line, than it did fifty years ago. That's true no matter where the production takes place. The trend continues to point in that direction, even though it may be flatter.
About the time I was born, the bulk of the workforce could support themselves and a family with one job in a field not requiring education past high school (if that). That's no longer true, and it never will be again, barring the collapse of civilization.
Even retail, hardly a well-paying field, is endangered. Every brick and mortar store that closes because of Amazon and its ilk means more efficient transactions--and fewer jobs. Soon all we'll have for people without a college degree is warehouse work and FedEx deliveries...until they automate those. And home health care, unless you're in Japan and they have robots for it.
Even for people with degrees, it's not going to be pretty. I maintain high-skill in-place crafts are about the only field immune to the combination of cheap foreign labor and technologically enhanced production. Work on your tile laying, kids.
The naked truth is that the current model of capitalism is going to implode, like a star that's consumed its fuel, at the point where there aren't enough people earning enough to support even the most frugal production and distribution models...unless we figure out a way to decouple the basic standard of living from the specifics of the labor market. The alternative is (as it was a couple of centuries ago) decoupling the aristocracy from their heads.
About the time I was born, the bulk of the workforce could support themselves and a family with one job in a field not requiring education past high school (if that). That's no longer true, and it never will be again, barring the collapse of civilization.
Even retail, hardly a well-paying field, is endangered. Every brick and mortar store that closes because of Amazon and its ilk means more efficient transactions--and fewer jobs. Soon all we'll have for people without a college degree is warehouse work and FedEx deliveries...until they automate those. And home health care, unless you're in Japan and they have robots for it.
Even for people with degrees, it's not going to be pretty. I maintain high-skill in-place crafts are about the only field immune to the combination of cheap foreign labor and technologically enhanced production. Work on your tile laying, kids.
The naked truth is that the current model of capitalism is going to implode, like a star that's consumed its fuel, at the point where there aren't enough people earning enough to support even the most frugal production and distribution models...unless we figure out a way to decouple the basic standard of living from the specifics of the labor market. The alternative is (as it was a couple of centuries ago) decoupling the aristocracy from their heads.
I don't disagree, yet at the same time there are loads of mitigating factors.
The money saved from someone not filling your car with gas and checking your oil went somewhere. The money save from employing slave labor went somewhere. The money saved by automation went somewhere.
Money didn't just disappear. It just went to a different pocket, another country or a combo of the two.
It is not unfeasible to bring some productions jobs back or even to keep some from leaving. It is not unfeasible to balance out the unbalanced trade deficit.
People want to work, for the most part. Corporations want more profits. Always. Everyday and all of the time. That is the larger issue as you said.
Still, it is feasible to enact legislation or take measures to keep some of that work here. Throwing up ones hands and saying, "I give" is hardly an a decent alternative to tariffs and decent legislation encouraging work kept here and limiting work shipped overseas.
In other words, we gave up too much, too easily and too soon.
The money saved from someone not filling your car with gas and checking your oil went somewhere. The money save from employing slave labor went somewhere. The money saved by automation went somewhere.
Money didn't just disappear. It just went to a different pocket, another country or a combo of the two.
It is not unfeasible to bring some productions jobs back or even to keep some from leaving. It is not unfeasible to balance out the unbalanced trade deficit.
People want to work, for the most part. Corporations want more profits. Always. Everyday and all of the time. That is the larger issue as you said.
Still, it is feasible to enact legislation or take measures to keep some of that work here. Throwing up ones hands and saying, "I give" is hardly an a decent alternative to tariffs and decent legislation encouraging work kept here and limiting work shipped overseas.
In other words, we gave up too much, too easily and too soon.
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axordil
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The money still does exist. There's just fewer pockets for it to pause in before it accumulates with the usual suspects. Wealth can be created with less and less labor, and what labor is required can be anywhere on the planet that has a more-or-less stable government with bribable officials. Even without the WTO, even without NAFTA, the trend remains...though those measures changed a gradual curve to free fall. Even before jobs went to Mexico, they headed south to non-union states in the US.
I don't want to give up--I want to change the set of values that prizes the efficient creation of wealth as the sole or even overriding purpose of the economy. The Law must serve man, not the other way around.
I don't want to give up--I want to change the set of values that prizes the efficient creation of wealth as the sole or even overriding purpose of the economy. The Law must serve man, not the other way around.
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axordil
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But why would you give me a chicken to chop down a tree when the Onceler's machine can cut down a hundred in that time, and work weekends? 
The population continues to grow, but there will be no worthwhile jobs for many of them. That's not a tenable combination unless something changes. Most of the options aren't nice. I'm trying to come up with ones that involve as little suffering as possible
The population continues to grow, but there will be no worthwhile jobs for many of them. That's not a tenable combination unless something changes. Most of the options aren't nice. I'm trying to come up with ones that involve as little suffering as possible
Yes, ax, this is something I've been wondering about a lot: what CAN be done? What economic system would be sustainable over the long haul?
“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” E. B. White, who must have had vison in mind. There's a reason why we kept putting the extra i in her name in our minds!
There was an article written that I'm pretty sure we talked about here that answers your questions quite well:Holbytla wrote:Seriously, cannot Apple afford to employ some manufacturers in this country?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/busin ... d=all&_r=0
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
<snip>
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
<snip>
“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”
Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say.
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axordil
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What they really mean is "Americans won't put up with bearing the brunt of incompetent executive decision making for fifteen dollars a day." It's not just that foreign labor is cheap, it's that it's effectively coerced through deprivation and desperation.
And people wonder why Apple stock is so high, and why they sit on a mountain of uninvested cash, and why it will be a cold day in hell before I buy anything from them, ever?
If Apple could make iCrap with ZERO human workers at all, they would, and you can bet the salaries at the top would go up as a result.
But they're only the most obvious offender (St. Jobs once famously told President Obama that the US needed to get rid of pesky pollution, safety and labor laws if it wanted manufacturing back. I'm glad he's dead). The same impulse is why other high-tech companies keep whining for more visas for foreign engineers and programmers. They claim there's a shortage here.
Bullshit. They want to be able to keep wages down via the threat of deportation. That won't play for a coder from Boston, but for one from Bangalore it's the equivalent of a loaded gun pointed at their head.
And people wonder why Apple stock is so high, and why they sit on a mountain of uninvested cash, and why it will be a cold day in hell before I buy anything from them, ever?
If Apple could make iCrap with ZERO human workers at all, they would, and you can bet the salaries at the top would go up as a result.
But they're only the most obvious offender (St. Jobs once famously told President Obama that the US needed to get rid of pesky pollution, safety and labor laws if it wanted manufacturing back. I'm glad he's dead). The same impulse is why other high-tech companies keep whining for more visas for foreign engineers and programmers. They claim there's a shortage here.
Bullshit. They want to be able to keep wages down via the threat of deportation. That won't play for a coder from Boston, but for one from Bangalore it's the equivalent of a loaded gun pointed at their head.
Bingo. Americans want silly rights, regulations and a living wage. The audacity!axordil wrote:What they really mean is "Americans won't put up with bearing the brunt of incompetent executive decision making for fifteen dollars a day." It's not just that foreign labor is cheap, it's that it's effectively coerced through deprivation and desperation.
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Voronwë the Faithful
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In a world where we absolutely cannot compete by racing to the bottom (lowest wages/least controls on pollution/who knows what), how can we have an economy that works for people?
Somehow we have to change our definition of "growth," perhaps, so that local, non-profit activities also count.
And in general, local economic ecosystems need to be strengthened.
It's such a quandary!
Somehow we have to change our definition of "growth," perhaps, so that local, non-profit activities also count.
And in general, local economic ecosystems need to be strengthened.
It's such a quandary!
“Wilbur never forgot Charlotte. Although he loved her children and grandchildren dearly, none of the new spiders ever quite took her place in his heart. She was in a class by herself. It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” E. B. White, who must have had vison in mind. There's a reason why we kept putting the extra i in her name in our minds!
But...doesn't that also mean since everything's made more efficiently that the work that we do stretches farther? Meaning, if my house and food and car and appliances and medicine and clothing all get cheaper, than it takes less labor to get those things than it would have before? If things get so sci-fi-level cheap and easy and efficient to produce that machines literally make everything on their own than doesn't that just mean the cost of getting those things eventually vanishes too?axordil wrote:But why would you give me a chicken to chop down a tree when the Onceler's machine can cut down a hundred in that time, and work weekends?
The population continues to grow, but there will be no worthwhile jobs for many of them.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists