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You should put in Yang in the place of one of the candidates with 0% polling:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/
Frankly I don't see any of the politician really solving the main issue coming in the next decade: the loss of jobs due to automation. We have to rethink the idea of "jobs" as the means to feed ourselves. While Yang is attempting to address this, UBI of $1000 funded mostly by VAT doesn't seem to be a convincing solution. The idea that Yang is pitching is that it provides a floor and a means for people to seek jobs, but pilot basic income programs doesn't show any signs that it incentivizes work.
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On May 15 2019 23:48 JimmiC wrote:
The other big portion is what do the people do if they are not working. If you include drive time and so on that is 60 hoursish a week. There is a lot of reasons why people don't retire and one is not knowing what to do with their time. It is not a bad thing a bunch of awesome things could possibly accomplished but it is a monumental shift in society.
But that is honestly nobody's business. I know you aren't exactly openly suggesting it, but even the fact how your posts mildly implies that we should somehow "keep people entertainted" by making them work is disgusting to me. I do not want to work and I do know extremely well what to do with my time - I already manage to spend far less time working than most people. My blood pressure immediately raises when someone even remotely suggest that we should waste time of people that to not want to work by creating useless work for them just because some other people aren't mentally prepared for a world without the need for work.
And this is not some kind of sci-fi, this is what is happening right here right now - there are already tons of people whose work is completely disposable in the grand scheme of things and only exists because the supply of workforce is stupidly large. So many people have jobs that consist solely of competing with other people or negating the effects of other people's jobs. Do you really think that all the paper pushers and everyone who spends their whole days in an office are desperately needed for the creation of goods? This isn't even my idea, the concept of "bullshit jobs" has gotten a lot of press recently, sadly mostly by non-mainstream voices, but a short google search shows you how many people are painfully aware of this.
Human time is the most precious thing there exists, yet it is the thing that we waste the most nonchalantly. We should not be creating jobs, but saving people from having to work.
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I am only allowed to support one person? Is there no poll type where you can select multiple options?
On May 15 2019 23:35 explosivekangaroo wrote:You should put in Yang in the place of one of the candidates with 0% polling: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/Frankly I don't see any of the politician really solving the main issue coming in the next decade: the loss of jobs due to automation. We have to rethink the idea of "jobs" as the means to feed ourselves. While Yang is attempting to address this, UBI of $1000 funded mostly by VAT doesn't seem to be a convincing solution. The idea that Yang is pitching is that it provides a floor and a means for people to seek jobs, but pilot basic income programs doesn't show any signs that it incentivizes work.
I think UBI is about humanity.. not about working....
Obviously giving people free money wouldn't incentivize them to go find employment. That is completely contrary to the point. The point is that humanity is moving to a stage where we don't *need* everyone to be working menial jobs all the time, so we should let people flourish in other ways.
edit: opisska, right on
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One reason for useless work is that a lot of industrial production has been outsourced to developing countries. I don’t think this post-work sentiment would be quite so apparent if you lived in China or Mexico and worked an average 47 hours per week. And the green energy transition is going to require a lot of labor. As far as I know, productivity has been rising steadily for a century without very meaningful reduction in avg. work hours. Labor militancy for something like 30h work weeks, more vacation time, and so on, seems more useful and likely to achieve success than paying off NEETs that want to drop out of society with a pittance.
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But that is largely because nobody is actively working towards to go of freeing people from work, that is the key problem. And the fact that people need to work to basically survive makes it sure that the offer is always plentiful. Despite people constantly complaining about "cost of labor" on the market, it is evident that labor is in fact heavily underpriced, because people can afford to invest into it even if the returns are marginal.
And this is why I think UBI is such a great idea because it has the potential to finally put some pressure on this system. I see a hope for a chain reaction where reducing the offer on the labor market even slightly (considering that some parts of Europe now experience zero unemployment during growth) pushes people into optimizing their business for less consumption of labor.
And honestly, if it makes the "west" a bit less productive, then even better because we really need to get less relatively rich than exactly those countries you mentioned so that we are forced to stop exploiting their cheap labor. It's exactly this labor that causes the lack of pressure for real automation - as long as it is easier to outsource it to SE Asia than to find a way to do it with less jobs, there again will be not enough pressure.
The technologies are here, automation is not that difficult. It's not exactly easy (source: I work in, albeit very small scale, automation for scientific methods and see how fucking hard it is to really make things in real world work without constant human interference) but it's not some wet dream, it's only a problem of engineering and scale, not waiting form some miraculous new inventions.
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On May 16 2019 01:16 Grumbels wrote:
One reason for useless work is that a lot of industrial production has been outsourced to developing countries. I don’t think this post-work sentiment would be quite so apparent if you lived in China or Mexico and worked an average 47 hours per week.
While I can't find flaw with these statements, I don't really see the point of them either.
And the green energy transition is going to require a lot of labor.
And those who are benefiting from that transition will need to compensate the people who do that labor. I don't think people who are for UBI are against labor. They are against people being treated like slaves.
As far as I know, productivity has been rising steadily for a century without very meaningful reduction in avg. work hours. Labor militancy for something like 30h work weeks, more vacation time, and so on, seems more useful and likely to achieve success than paying off NEETs that want to drop out of society with a pittance.
How will lowering worked hours help people who make $7.25 an hour? This NEET shit shows how callous people can be towards fellow humans in different circumstances.
People like to make something of themselves. Everyone wants to be successful and acknowledged and contribute. No one wants to sit at home all day mooching off the system, those people are unhappy and need to be helped - not treated like slaves for their lack of education.
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There is a Dutch sociologist that has a concept called cognitive capitalism, which states that nowadays more and more value is derived from marketing and knowledge production, rather than from the raw manufacture. This is evident in brand management and in the financialization of many common services. If you get some credit from a warehouse to buy branded shoes you are probably going to pay hundreds of dollars to purchase a product that costs 5 bucks to make. The actual shoe is almost besides the point, most of the added value, from a capitalist perspective, lies outside. There are a great many companies that have some sort of product, that might be meaningful and useful (think Silicon Valley companies) that nevertheless derive most of their value from advertisements, marketing, and the ability to leverage future sales to acquire venture capital. That’s one reason you have so many tech millionaires for companies that aren’t even making a profit.
My brother works in a factory where he literally has to put cherries on top of icecream, which apparently can’t be automated. I would think this is a corruption of work, he’s wasting his life in order to modify an already unhealthy product to be more easily brandable and marketable, but he is not adding any actual value to the icecream from a more fundamental point of view. But that’s not what capitalism cares about. My second brother is an English teacher, who mostly teaches in trade schools to students that need to know English for purposes of international communication or the ability to use English language manuals. In some ways he too is part of cognitive capitalism, since widespread knowledge of English serves as a sort of lubricant for international movement of knowledge.
I think once you look for it, you’ll find it is everywhere.
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On May 16 2019 01:29 travis wrote:Show nested quote +On May 16 2019 01:16 Grumbels wrote:
One reason for useless work is that a lot of industrial production has been outsourced to developing countries. I don’t think this post-work sentiment would be quite so apparent if you lived in China or Mexico and worked an average 47 hours per week.
While I can't find flaw with these statements, I don't really see the point of them either. And those who are benefiting from that transition will need to compensate the people who do that labor. I don't think people who are for UBI are against labor. They are against people being treated like slaves. Show nested quote +
As far as I know, productivity has been rising steadily for a century without very meaningful reduction in avg. work hours. Labor militancy for something like 30h work weeks, more vacation time, and so on, seems more useful and likely to achieve success than paying off NEETs that want to drop out of society with a pittance.
How will lowering worked hours help people who make $7.25 an hour? This NEET shit shows how callous people can be towards fellow humans in different circumstances. People like to make something of themselves. Everyone wants to be successful and acknowledged and contribute. No one wants to sit at home all day mooching off the system, those people are unhappy and need to be helped - not treated like slaves for their lack of education.
Mobilization to increase minimum wage, unemployment, disability, child benefits and various proposals such as eliminating rent seeking classes such as health insurance, predatory lenders and various types of land lords, will more meaningfully address this issue than hoping for an UBI to solve all these problems imo. The latter is not actually tied to anything, at most your corporate overlords will give you barely enough to survive and you’ll probably still be forced to work anyway.
And this discussion isn't new, I saw this today from 1944 which is a policy platform to the left of almost every current candidate.
![[image loading]](https://slideplayer.com/slide/14684097/90/images/41/President+Roosevelt%E2%80%99s+new+deal.jpg)
Some more information here.
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On May 15 2019 23:35 explosivekangaroo wrote:You should put in Yang in the place of one of the candidates with 0% polling: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/Frankly I don't see any of the politician really solving the main issue coming in the next decade: the loss of jobs due to automation. We have to rethink the idea of "jobs" as the means to feed ourselves. While Yang is attempting to address this, UBI of $1000 funded mostly by VAT doesn't seem to be a convincing solution. The idea that Yang is pitching is that it provides a floor and a means for people to seek jobs, but pilot basic income programs doesn't show any signs that it incentivizes work.
That's a non issue, imo. Jobs go away due to automation just shifts what can be done. Automation in the auto industry didn't kill off so many jobs and no new opportunities for other things to fill it. Service industry grows as we automate more.
As long as produtivity and GDP increases jobs will be made. Outside of purely financial jobs that make money off of money, value added to production and the exchange of good and services will lead to jobs. Just the the types of jobs change.
You dont sell shit if people dont have jobs and money, you cant automate all jobs into oblivion because there would be no markets to make stuff you'd want to automate to begin with because no one would buy it. Demand exists jobs excists
I think the issue is wealth concentration is too extreme. Inequality can be just fine but too much will depress growth as goods and services cant drain the wealth even if they wanted to, too much wealth just sitting doing nothing for the economy.
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On May 16 2019 01:32 Grumbels wrote:
There is a Dutch sociologist that has a concept called cognitive capitalism, which states that nowadays more and more value is derived from marketing and knowledge production, rather than from the raw manufacture. This is evident in brand management and in the financialization of many common services. If you get some credit from a warehouse to buy branded shoes you are probably going to pay hundreds of dollars to purchase a product that costs 5 bucks to make. The actual shoe is almost besides the point, most of the added value, from a capitalist perspective, lies outside. There are a great many companies that have some sort of product, that might be meaningful and useful (think Silicon Valley companies) that nevertheless derive most of their value from advertisements, marketing, and the ability to leverage future sales to acquire venture capital. That’s one reason you have so many tech millionaires for companies that aren’t even making a profit.
My brother works in a factory where he literally has to put cherries on top of icecream, which apparently can’t be automated. I would think this is a corruption of work, he’s wasting his life in order to modify an already unhealthy product to be more easily brandable and marketable, but he is not adding any actual value to the icecream from a more fundamental point of view. But that’s not what capitalism cares about. My second brother is an English teacher, who mostly teaches in trade schools to students that need to know English for purposes of international communication or the ability to use English language manuals. In some ways he too is part of cognitive capitalism, since widespread knowledge of English serves as a sort of lubricant for international movement of knowledge.
I think once you look for it, you’ll find it is everywhere.
Yeah man, you really hit the nail on its head here. The question is, what do you think about it? Do you see it as wrong? Do you see it as wrong, while being an inevitable consequence of capitalism and do you see it as wrong enough so that it's worth rethinking whether capitalism is the best choice? I still, influenced by first-hand experience of centrally-run society, want to believe that there is a way to stop going in this way while leaving a significant amount of liberties in the hands of individuals, but I am not really sure that it's not just wishful thinking.
Because what you describe here shows the most important flaw of capitalism, or any societal organization which is overwhelmingly based on the wishes of individuals: it has the ability to become insanely inefficient once resources aren't sufficiently limited.
@JimmiC: yeah, my tone was maybe uncalled for, but it was somewhat backwards justified by your reaction, you really hold views that I have accused you of, so why are you even mad at me for presuming that? You know, I am not denying that a lot of people can have problems with not being tied up in a pointless job. I also think that there should always be enough opportunity for people that want to work to do so and feel like they are "contributing" or whatever (I just don't know forsthand what it is that people feel when they are working and makes them feel good, sorry). But I firmly believe that making sure people do NOT have the work if they don't want to should be one of the primary goals of humanity and so far I have not seen a SINGLE policy that would be even proposed by a mainstream politician to this end, with the sole exception of UBI, so if I am judging candidates, looking at their stance towards UBI is seriously the key point for me.
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On May 07 2019 02:08 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On May 07 2019 01:47 Velr wrote:
You think the pocahontas bs is ruining warren or what exactly? Shes been associating with the far left for so long that shes never going to be able to shake that off in a general or even a serious primary. She also burned her bridges with the far left by endorseing hillary instead of sanders. She has no base and more skeletons in the open then anyone other then trump.
This is not true, e.g. Jacobin (influential "far-left" publication) has articles in support of Warren and I recall a lot of support for her policy platform on various places such as twitter. It is true that there is skepticism about any candidate other than Bernie, but if you think that politically active leftists won't fall in line behind Warren in a general election you're completely wrong. The left is rather less vulnerable to personality cults than many other factions, in fact they're likely to turn on you at the slightest error (which is good), but they're capable of perceiving that Warren has a significantly more progressive platform than Clinton in 2016. Also, nobody cares about a slight gaffe with the native bloodline stuff, that's just one news cycle that went bad for her and every normal person will forget about it in a week.
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I also don’t believe the theory that Warren burned bridges with the left by backing Clinton. I’m sure none of them were happy with it, but I do not get the impression that they are so petty to hold a grudge. Of course there are those folks out there that still make a lot of noise about it, but I believe that translates into real numbers.
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Yeah, Bernie backed Clinton in the general election too, falling in line with the greater good/ "closest politically" mentality. Neither Warren nor Bernie seemed to have lost support due to that.
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I don't think Warren really has any bridge to the far left, she's got them with progressives and I think those are fine. She's a lot less people's first pick after she didn't run in 2016 and endorsed Clinton though. I think rhetorically she's comparable to Sanders but her 2016 performance gives me the impression she'll completely fold to the party when the pressure is on. Plus she's a terrible campaigner even if she had the best policy ideas.
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On May 15 2019 08:04 ShambhalaWar wrote:Show nested quote +On May 15 2019 07:29 Meta wrote:
My top picks are:
Bernie
Warren
Yang
Gabbard
The rest are not inspiring, in my view. Bernie Warren Yang I agree, those are my preferences as well, in that order, and minus Gabbard. * I wish Yang got more attention, universal basic income is a really interesting idea, and an eventual bridge we will all need to cross.
Gabbard has recently announced being open to a UBI plan, just throwing that out there. Plus I completely agree with her foreign policy. Ever dollar spent on bombs could be spent on us instead.
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On May 16 2019 00:30 opisska wrote:Show nested quote +On May 15 2019 23:48 JimmiC wrote:
The other big portion is what do the people do if they are not working. If you include drive time and so on that is 60 hoursish a week. There is a lot of reasons why people don't retire and one is not knowing what to do with their time. It is not a bad thing a bunch of awesome things could possibly accomplished but it is a monumental shift in society. But that is honestly nobody's business. I know you aren't exactly openly suggesting it, but even the fact how your posts mildly implies that we should somehow "keep people entertainted" by making them work is disgusting to me. I do not want to work and I do know extremely well what to do with my time - I already manage to spend far less time working than most people. My blood pressure immediately raises when someone even remotely suggest that we should waste time of people that to not want to work by creating useless work for them just because some other people aren't mentally prepared for a world without the need for work. And this is not some kind of sci-fi, this is what is happening right here right now - there are already tons of people whose work is completely disposable in the grand scheme of things and only exists because the supply of workforce is stupidly large. So many people have jobs that consist solely of competing with other people or negating the effects of other people's jobs. Do you really think that all the paper pushers and everyone who spends their whole days in an office are desperately needed for the creation of goods? This isn't even my idea, the concept of "bullshit jobs" has gotten a lot of press recently, sadly mostly by non-mainstream voices, but a short google search shows you how many people are painfully aware of this. Human time is the most precious thing there exists, yet it is the thing that we waste the most nonchalantly. We should not be creating jobs, but saving people from having to work.
The problem is that we don't seem to be a point yet where automation is enough to make most human labor unnecessary. And even if we are there, that would mean redistribution of wealth, which is a toxic concept to most people.
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On May 16 2019 01:40 semantics wrote:Show nested quote +On May 15 2019 23:35 explosivekangaroo wrote:You should put in Yang in the place of one of the candidates with 0% polling: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/democratic_nomination_polls/Frankly I don't see any of the politician really solving the main issue coming in the next decade: the loss of jobs due to automation. We have to rethink the idea of "jobs" as the means to feed ourselves. While Yang is attempting to address this, UBI of $1000 funded mostly by VAT doesn't seem to be a convincing solution. The idea that Yang is pitching is that it provides a floor and a means for people to seek jobs, but pilot basic income programs doesn't show any signs that it incentivizes work. That's a non issue, imo. Jobs go away due to automation just shifts what can be done. Automation in the auto industry didn't kill off so many jobs and no new opportunities for other things to fill it. Service industry grows as we automate more. As long as produtivity and GDP increases jobs will be made. Outside of purely financial jobs that make money off of money, value added to production and the exchange of good and services will lead to jobs. Just the the types of jobs change. You dont sell shit if people dont have jobs and money, you cant automate all jobs into oblivion because there would be no markets to make stuff you'd want to automate to begin with because no one would buy it. Demand exists jobs excists I think the issue is wealth concentration is too extreme. Inequality can be just fine but too much will depress growth as goods and services cant drain the wealth even if they wanted to, too much wealth just sitting doing nothing for the economy.
From a practical perspective I don't see that jobs are always going to be made. The type of jobs that can be automated is the vast majority of repetitive labor from fast food workers to law clerks and radiologists.
This does not increase the demand, and thus job openings, in the remaining fields such as technology/education/management/social services/creative.
You still sell stuff, just more to the rich than the poor and, increasingly, the middle class.
And while you can argue that in order to have freedom and meritocracy, 'survival of the fittest' is necessary, the problem is that this is a democracy. If the unemployment rate rose to 25% it's not hard to see that people will vote for a different economic system such as socialism, and I don't think socialism works.
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EPT
