Topic: Economic Devastation - page 76. (Read 504813 times)

The argument is common sense. People with PhDs who teach classes on automation are saying that the automation that is happening today will eliminate the middle class. We'll end up with only super rich and desperately poor. That is the consensus among experts.

Oh you're an engineer? They can't take your job? Then everyone and his mother will become engineers and flood the market, driving wages down.

No comments on my piece? I think it was good 

For those who have been private messaging me with concerns and/or questions, I will try one more time to give links to some of the information I researched, but I don't have time to do an exhaustive redump of the thread that got deleted from the this forum.

I was approaching 3.5 - 5.0 EDSS, so you can see why it makes sense that my work performance was faltering (and noting that programming is much more intense mental work than other jobs, e.g. I had no problem with forum posting but the M.S. made it very difficult to program regularly):



Here is the link to the page where you can dig for the all videos and other information from the Brazilian neurologist:

http://www.vitamindwiki.com/Multiple+Sclerosis

http://www.vitamindwiki.com/1000+IU+per+kg+Vitamin+D+for+autoimmune+diseases+%E2%80%93+Coimbra+Aug+2013

http://www.vitamindwiki.com/Video+by+Dr.+Coimbra+%E2%80%93+95+percent+of+auto-immune+cured+with+vitamin+D+in+high+doses+-+April+2014


Now I have something very important to share.

Vitamin D3 was not the total cure until I added the co-enzymated B complex

I was much improved on the high dose vitamin D3 but I was still getting
milder relapses. I added the "B Healthy" brand co-enzymated B complex
(regular B complex is toxic!!) with every meal about 4 - 5X per day; and I
can't believe how strong I am. I just want to go, go, go, go same as I
always was in my youth!

Today I worked out so hard in the gym, the 20 year old guys could not keep up with me. Literally! That is my former self. I did not achieve this level of energy with the high dose vitamin D3 alone. It was not until I added the Methylation Cycle supplements that I really burst out into this amazing feeling of good health. It is 1.22am here, and I just returned from a night of disco dancing with someone less than half my age. This is after a very hard gym workout in the afternoon. Amazing.


http://www.drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/CFS_-_The_Methylation_Cycle#The_Methylation_Cycle_-_which_supplements_to_take_to_support



http://www.ultralaboratories.com/emeraldlabs/B-Healthy/index.php

http://www.vitacost.com/emerald-labs-coenzymated-b-healthy-60-vegetable-capsules-1


http://www.luckyvitamin.com/p-118096-emerald-labs-b-healthy-raw-whole-food-based-formula-60-vegetarian-capsules

The fear is that capitalists will invest in all these robots and economies-of-scale so they can produce products for no one, because no one is employed.

Makes a lot of sense. 

What stuff do people need for their living?
- food
- shelter
- transportation
- physical things
- immaterial things
- services

Physical things have already become unbelievably cheaper compared to 300 years ago, so that ordinary people own infinitely more possessions than people then did, yet the resale value of a typical estate is near zero.

Immaterial things are free to duplicate, so they are often free and without IPR's the rest would become even cheaper as well.

Food is problematic, because TPTB has a grip on the production, causing bad quality and hindering subsistence farming. I envision a world where the number of manhours spent on farming would somewhat increase from the current, and food would be much better quality than before. Exact ways how to achieve this are more detailed than the scope here. To get high-quality food, human labor is likely irreplaceable, but then again gardening is fun.

Transportation is dependent on energy. So as energy becomes cheaper, transportation will as well. It can get more automated as well. Also the communications and 3-D printing reduce the need of physical transportation of people and goods.

Shelter has become the most expensive need to satisfy, due to the vast improvement in living standards, and also suffocating regulations. There is much to improve in efficiency and variety in housing conditions, regardless of the standard of luxury and convenience.

Services are the balance item. All production in excess of satisfying the physical needs and wants (including the immaterial things) is naturally attracted to services, which are upper-bounded by the number of people, and whose productivity can only moderately be increased by advances in technology. (This is a circular definition, because I define "services" to include the activity that fulfills this criterion, and other production being the domain where progress can increase efficiency by leaps and bounds.)

If we accept that the concentration of both financial and knowledge capital leads to the "dystopian" state of affairs that all other production except services was owned by very few, and employing almost nobody, this will not lead to the outcome that everyone else would live in abject poverty and misery.

Why would they? The production of everything that people need has increased per capita, and people have a limit how much they can rationally use. For the owner class to further increase their standard of living, they want to employ the "rest of us" in the service sector, and the wages they need to competitively offer, will be spent by the people to acquire the basic needs of living that the owner class is producing. Without this exchange, the owner class would be bereft of their services, and would have nobody to buy their goods, clearly an illogical outcome.

I posit that the state is currently consuming most of the resources that could be used for production of services, for their myopic attempts of maintaining "full employment" by employing people in sectors that don't produce anything of value (or even negative value) - in the west the main ones are government bureaucracy, "welfare", "education", "healthcare" and war industry. If we got rid of these, up to 80% of the people would not need to work, yet the production would increase as the monopolies, regulations, etc. would be dissolved. The rich and the knowledgeable would get richer and enjoy life much more, but also the vast majority would see their living standard and especially quality of life improved greatly, after a transition period of course (it is not realistic to assume that a change of this magnitude could happen instantly and learnign to live in freedom will certainly be an inconvenient or even painful experience to many who are not used to it).

TL; DR: There is nothing new under the sun. What the luddites of today fear, has been proved wrong every time there was any advance in efficiency since the dawn of mankind. Now we even have a huge reserve of pent-up production capacity, because most of the people of today are just working in the system doing nothing of value. With the release of these people, the future looks brighter than most of us can even imagine.


Further reading: Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (1946), ISBN 978-193355021-3

There is still no argument, you just pointed to a random teacher. Why would a capitalist further automate a process and earn less?

Automation will result in a net loss of jobs, period. That's the whole fucking point.

Anyone who tries to argue against this is experiencing some massive cognitive dissonance for one reason or another. Fear? Jealousy? Ignorance? Take your pick.

All production is consumed by humans. The robots don't eat. If we make the robots produce stuff with a 10 times higher efficiency, it must mean that either humans are enjoying 10 times more stuff, or doing 9/10ths less work (or combination). The equation does not have other roots.

Many are concerned about the distribution problem. A short answer is that when making 10 times more stuff with the same resources, it is easy to make everyone better off: even if some enjoy ultimate opulence, the rest also do better than the kings of early ages. Without working necessarily at all.

The current system seems to be trying to hinder the progression to this nirvanatic condition, by imposing an incalculable number of rules and regulations to thwart freedom in relations and businesses, and seems to be ready to unleash death and destruction to hinder it further. This is somewhat of a shame, but I don't think they will be any more able to resist advance than all the previous systems.

Good argument. What was the argument again?

When wages go down, it makes sense to employ humans in place of machines.

=> Automatization can only happen in the environment of rising wages.

-------------------------------------------------

It's important to remember that we are talking about real wages here. If you can buy more with your earnings, your wages have risen. Even if you make nothing, you can get many services (WIFI, for example) for free almost everywhere, which means that you are better off than a person earning nothing 20 years ago This is the increase in real wages even as nominal wages are stagnant. (Yes, I am aware that acquiring the same quality of food as was commonplace 50 years ago is really difficult and expensive today, so not all is good.)

And what will those automatons be paid in?

Automation necessitates socialism.

The idea that once a job becomes automated, new jobs will be created that the unemploymed people can move to which is equal in or higher in wages has shown to not be an accurate prediction. Capitalists work within their idealistic system which does not represent the constraints of reality.

Surplus labor is continuing to increase, wages overall will contine to decrease until there is social revolution.

And what will those wages be paid in?

That's ludditism. The automation will not occur until wages raise high enough, and the current capital is worn down.

For those who haven't read the essay linked in the opening post of this thread, you will continue to not understand why labor is fungible (and thus subservient to monetary capital accumulation) and knowledge work is not fungible.

The fact is that every technological revolution that has destroyed labor, has spawned much higher paying jobs in knowledge.

What has sustained labor has been the inability of knowledge to sell itself directly into the market. This is changing now with direct distribution of knowledge products over the internet.

In case you missed the point, we want to destroy labor.

Sorry if I won't be able to repeat these points over and over again for every Malthusian who can't be bothered to digest my essays and including the "Information Is Alive!" essay too.

I dont like how Russia etc roll but your average Western European is so hopelessly dependent on the system that they are literally complicit in their own demise. Your average American cannot go more than an hour without using their smartphones, ordering Starbucks or stuffing their faces with high-fructose syrup laden, super-caloric frankenfoods.

CoinCube,

There is one point that I made a long time ago which I think got muddled or forgotten or at least de-emphasized by recent arguments.

Anonymity does not stop societies from forming governments and pooling their resources (with taxes). What it disables is government that does not have the consent of the governed, because it means the government has to get taxes on the honor system and not by tracking people like slaves. Whereas, voting is not an effective means of measuring if a government has consent of the governed, because votes can be bought with promises of stealing from ourselves (with debt) to buy ourselves into slavery.

In fact, the income tax in the USA was historically always an honor system, and in greater fact because it is illegal and the government would not have won if it had forced it of the people illegally. But now we've reached the point where the government doesn't respect the rule of law, so they can move to totalitarian enforcement of illegal taxation.

In short, you conflate the enabling of willful (opt-in) organization with the lack of convergence due to no organization. Thus your entire thesis started with a strawman.

I wish you would come back to the point of realizing that long-term anonymity is a good thing. We always had it with bearer cash. But bearer cash is being eliminated if we don't fix the problem technologically. Even the man alleged to be Satoshi understood the critical importance of personal property being bearer.



There have always been crimes. And there always will be. Anonymity was not the cause of crime in the past and won't be in the future. The cause of crime is human nature.

The problem is that the nanny-state psychology doesn't waterfall revert. This is why such centralized manipulation sometimes results in Dark Ages.

I am "gruff" because I see a very significant danger we are sliding into a Dark Age of NWO fascist totalitarianism with the masses fully conditioned to accept the slow burn eugenics paradigm.

Bitcoin seems to be doing its role to aid that outcome. As I said, I support Bitcoin because it can be conduit to a potential solution. But I want to remain frank about what I think Bitcoin's other impact will be.

That we and the elite both need Bitcoin, speaks to why it is succeeding. Anything that is more aligned to our true ideology and not aligned at all to the NWO outcome for Bitcoin is going to fought very hard by the current system.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-05-12/face-baltimore-you-wont-see-news

Getting as far away from the zombie westerners as possible.