US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6923

Yes, I agree that many of the current "learn X in Y time" is complete unreliable trash. Part of it is that programmers have delusions of grandeur and think they can do whatever they please because software. Part of it is that we genuinely don't take education seriously below the university level. No, I wouldn't expect courses like that to be a career shift - that isn't very feasible - but it should be sufficient for lateral shifts to ease people into a related, but not fully analogous, line of semiskilled work.

University work requires a university education, full stop. But semiskilled is more like assembling airplanes according to specifications provided by engineers, a more feasible skill to learn more quickly.

The painful truth for a lot of things in the modern world is that we simply don't need all that many people to get things done. We just need a few people with deeper expertise. I'll give the military as my example. A lot of the reason why we simply don't use conscripts much anymore is because what really matters in modern warfare isn't lots of mildly trained meat shields, but rather a core force of well-trained career military folk who understand how to use the increasingly advanced weapons to their full potential. The draft didn't just go away because it was unpopular, it also just became less necessary. Like for all my earlier criticisms of drones, it's hard to argue that you need more foot soldiers when a lot of the hardware can just be robots operated from afar. Not in all circumstances of course, but in enough that you need fewer meatbags on the front.

And the same thing goes for a lot of civilian occupations. There just simply isn't a need for a lot of people anymore. Sometimes they just have to compete on price with robots and foreign peasants, which is a losing battle. Often they're forced into minimum wage service occupations, which is a decline in the quality of life for sure.

However, it's also important to think about where this leads, and I'm going to partially echo the argument of whitedoge (RIP) as to why this can't be just an "oh well, spoils of war" situation. Well of course there's the obvious reason that disenfranchised people will rebel and undermine the entire strength of the first world economy. It helps that the people most disaffected are disproportionately skilled at organizing for political gain and organized in militia groups relative to a more cityward population. Beyond that, we have that there is little point of production if no one buys stuff - which isn't great with wealth inequality. And another issue is a dependence on energy because, let's face it, machines don't run on the power of hope. And oil/gas/other energy supplies are some of the most complex and important issues of the modern world and will continue to be, probably forever.

The Great Recession was, on the one hand, just a series of financial fuckups that hit the economy harder than before. On the surface at least, that's what it was, and that is a matter that has seen a resolution by now. But below the surface was a structural readjustment on the part of many companies. Truth is that their technology has outpaced their need for employing people for a while now (the 1980s or so are the start of this) and the recession gave the best excuse they ever needed to cull their workforce. So all the people left without a job continue to be left without a job. This, combined with certain poorly conceived forms of FP adventurism, are an existential crisis that genuinely threaten to compromise the nations that currently fall into the first world.