Authoritarian and Totalitarian Democracies

[Rick]

 Other than Matthew 26:11, the most accurate information about poverty there is, is the following

https://www.google.com/search?q=thomas+sowell+on+poverty&oq=&aqs=chrome.3.35i39i362l8.299208185j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

There is another one that, rather older, is I warrant considerably more thought provoking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier

[rmgill]

5 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

If you stopped immigration dead, you would still have a problem of technology making business's require less people.

Dial it back from 21 where it's at now. We don't need uneducated lower income workers. We're PAYING people to not work. 

Dial back on regulations that make it difficult to operate businesses and industries in the US. The cost model for running a business in the US has about $50,000 tacked on to every employee. You hire a staffer to push a broom around, you're paying him $25,000 a year in a basic wage. Your actual outlay is $75,000. 

That's where your automation push is coming from. 

5 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

There is literally no way around that, unless you educate everyone up to participate in the online economy.

You still need power lines, water lines, sewer lines. You still need staff to rack and connect switches, servers, storage. The cloud does not configure itself. You still need grocery stockers, order pickers, shipping handlers, manufacturing and a large variety of other tasks. 
 

5 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

That is not endorsing uncontrolled immigration, but there is certainly an unavoidable fact that in my country manufacturers (and builders for that matter) have done a lousy job at training up the next generation of engineers, so they feel the only way they can get them is import them from abroad.

Sorry, the schools are supposed to be doing that. They've been failing. Look at any reports on Baltimore city schools and their "graduates" who cannot read OR write. The government schools have been committing fraud for decades. Fraud as in graduating students who cannot functionally read or write at a 12 grade level. Let alone a 7th grade level. 
 

5 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

That should be ended, but it requires Government intervention to force employers to invest in those skills, and in the UK that has become a shorthand for 'socialism.'

It doen't need to be that way at all. Your socialism make the problem and has the solution to the problems that it makes isn't needed. 

5 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

So we dont import enough new engineers or scientists, and the country ends up in a long decline because its cheaper to manufacture on the continent anyway.

We made engineers who were able to do the math to send men to the moon with slide rules and chalk on a board. We don't need commies to do it thank you very much. The schools need to go back to basics. 

Most of the education system needs to be scrapped and the core functions of reading, writing and artithmatic need to be brought back. 

[DKTanker]

8 minutes ago, rmgill said:

Dial it back from 21 where it's at now. We don't need uneducated lower income workers. We're PAYING people to not work. 

Dial back on regulations that make it difficult to operate businesses and industries in the US. The cost model for running a business in the US has about $50,000 tacked on to every employee. You hire a staffer to push a broom around, you're paying him $25,000 a year in a basic wage. Your actual outlay is $75,000. 

That's where your automation push is coming from. 

The introduction of power looms and the Jacquard looms of the early 19th C caused revolts and riots leading to quite a bit of bloodshed and death.  The push for automation wasn't because of regulations, there essentially were none at the time.  The push for automation and technology, as it has always been through the entirety of the human experience, is to make life easier and more profitable.  That's what the entire industrial revolution was about. 

For those that bemoan increased automation, would they have automation banished and return life to a state of no automation and technology?  You can't just turn off the tap that is human ingenuity, though many have tried, to do so requires yet another level of regulation.

[Ivanhoe]

Anti-automation Luddies should be forced to eat only such foodstuffs as grown on fields they themselves tilled with a wooden digging stick.

I believe that most of them (most of the survivors, anyways) would eventually realize that they aren't opposed to technology per se, they are opposed to technology that moves the status quo away from the perceived optimum for them.

 

[rmgill]

Yes, but the added regulatory cost per employee IS a pressure towards automation that is lower in overall cost. 
 

Minimum wage laws also do this and have secondary effects on coops and other systems that might otherwise work well for the folks involved. The old high functioning sanitariums for example. 

Edited October 22, 2024 by rmgill

[Ssnake]

7 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

requires Government intervention to force employers to invest in those skills, and in the UK that has become a shorthand for 'socialism.'

...maybe all it takes are good incentives, and labor unions that are aware of the issues. At least that's how we handled it here in Germany. We found it unacceptable that there was a higher unemployment rate among the young through the 1990s...2010s (compared to the general population) so the unions were willing to give a little as well as there were certain tax incentives to take in school graduates for internships and training (plus, a generally higher rate of vocational career paths than trying to push everybody through college, a thing that for decades some very stupid OECD economists chastized Germany for).

With the Covid pandemic came then a very rapid shift where laid-off workers moved into other fields and won't be coming back. That shift probably would have occurred anyway, but the lockdowns certainly accelerated the trend. Now companies are facing a situation where they have to compete for new talent, and that applies to all of Europe. The question is, which countries can in the forseeable future still get new workers at all. Clamping down on immigration too hard will have its second-order effects in about a decade.

[DKTanker]

Does Germany no longer do Kindergeld?  

[Ssnake]

It does, but it's demonstrably useless, wherever it was tried, no matter the amount.

[DKTanker]

35 minutes ago, Ssnake said:

It does, but it's demonstrably useless, wherever it was tried, no matter the amount.

No matter the amount?  I think that is demonstrably false.  It may go by another name, it may be another program, it may be something cultural but, something is encouraging immigration and encouraging migrants to out reproduce natives. Obviously not limited to Germany, I'm discussing much of the developed world.

[Ssnake]

Oh, well, sure ... if you're referring to the sum of all welfare programs as a pull factor, that's definitely a thing.

 

I was referring to the countless attempts in pretty much all the developed countries to incentivize the domestic population with money to up the reproduction rate. During my childhood my mother received 50 Deutschmarks per month, now it's, I think, 350.- EUR for the first child and then gradually less for second, third, fourth, ... - hasn't worked. Doesn't, by the way, work for second and third generation of immigrants either. They very quickly adapt to the same birth rates as the rest of the nation.

It hasn't worked in Italy, Spain, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Great Britain, France, ...  Wherever you look, paying money has never boosted fertility rates by a statistically significant margin. Social status for motherhood, yeah, that works, but it runs against the tenets of feminism, so we're conducting one hello of a Kabuki show to distract from that politically unpalatable causality.

Boost the social standing of motherhood, and organize rolling blackouts, if you want to boost domestic fertility

[futon]

De-emphasize mass entertainment. The various forms of electronic entertainment in the modern times creates a lost decade for those in their 20s. (Rolling Blackouts). High univetsity tuition with useless degrees is another one, burdening young adults with debt for their next 15 years in their young adult life. 

Edited October 22, 2024 by futon

[bojan]

1 hour ago, futon said:

De-emphasize mass entertainment.

Genie is out of bottle and there is no putting  it back.

Quote

The various forms of electronic entertainment in the modern times creates a lost decade for those in their 20s.

Same.

Quote

(Rolling Blackouts).

 It might be a semi joke by Ssnake, but problem is that people really are incredibly dependant on 24/7 availability of electricity.

Quote

High univetsity tuition with useless degrees is another one, burdening young adults with debt for their next 15 years in their young adult life.

That is not much of the factor in Europe.

[futon]

3 hours ago, bojan said:

Genie is out of bottle and there is no putting  it back.

Same.

 It might be a semi joke by Ssnake, but problem is that people really are incredibly dependant on 24/7 availability of electricity.

That is not much of the factor in Europe.

1st and 2nd) Sure the genie can go back in. It's a realization that all these fancy electronic forms of entertainment have a negative impact on society at large. The 8 hours a day thing week after week year after year for a person in their 20s is shameful and embarrassing. Time to act like an adult. Spread the idea, and if adopted, the understanding becomes the culture, then market adjust to it. The number of adult buyers goes down, and the makers of those products adjust their primary target audience. Whichever society in broad terms (always there will be niches within or levels of moderation) does not do so simply falls behind the societies that do so. So then you have the consumer society that slowly consumes itself into nothingness and the producer society that moves on.

3rd) Yes, of course, its a joke. 

4th) It isn't a specific factor for Japan either. 

[Ssnake]

3 hours ago, futon said:

3rd) Yes, of course, its a joke. 

...or is it not?

The causality between big blackouts and spikes in births nine months later is well established. Turn off the TV and lights, and see what most people choose to do to entertain themselves. Of course, it's not really going to work. Once that rolling blackouts become a regular occurrence, people will start investing into electricity generators and other means to bypass government mandated bed time. I realize that. But computer games and TV until late evening most certainly are negatively correlated with sexual activity, and that most certainly has a causal realtion to fertility rates.

If you want fertility rates to go up, and if you're serious about changing that as a society, the simple truth is that people need to have more sex. Nothing can substitute that basic precondition.

[futon]

Just want 2.1, not 5.5 ( ; ゜Д゜)

[urbanoid]

The whole point of blackouts becomes moot when people are not in relationships in the first place. Also BC exists, it's not going to stop working just because power is out at the moment.

[seahawk]

Blackouts are just a cause, that denies typical alternative ways of spending an evening. There is a strange correlation between the availability of TVs and birth rates in all western countries. Now you have just more options to spent your time, but you can see it already when there were a few TV programs and nothing much else. If you are old enough you will remember your parents or grand parents still watching TV in the evening, and you can be certain that the program showed something, that they really wanted to watch, on few evenings.

Another factor is your level of education and wealth. At a certain point, most people come to the conclusion that having many children makes it very unlikely for them to reach the same level of wealth as their parents and it also becomes hard to keep the level of wealth the potential parents have had the moment.

We can see that the uneducated poor are still having plenty off-spring. That is on one hand because a child is a net positive for them, due to social payments, but also because they think a lot less about consequences.

[Ivanhoe]

5 hours ago, Ssnake said:

If you want fertility rates to go up, and if you're serious about changing that as a society, the simple truth is that people need to have more sex. Nothing can substitute that basic precondition.

Detroit is responsible for the post-WWII Baby Boom, the solution is right in front of us;

 

 

[Rick]

7 hours ago, Ivanhoe said:

Detroit is responsible for the post-WWII Baby Boom, the solution is right in front of us;

 

 

Parked in a drive in theater.

[Stuart Galbraith]

 

[Rick]

16 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

 

Along with Bob Seger's Greatest Hits Album, Bat Out of Hell is one the best rock albums ever.

[Mr King]

It was only a matter of time before they started to other Elon Musk by accusing him of Russian collusion.

 

 

[Skywalkre]

On 10/22/2024 at 12:25 AM, Stuart Galbraith said:

Its been declining across the west, not just in America. But I wouldnt disagree. Just look at the cost of higher education now. In the UK you are in many cases paying off University fees till you get to retirement, if the industry you enter into isnt as profitable as you thought it was. Which, with the way technology is moving, is seemingly frequently the case.

Unfortunately over here (can't speak for what it's like in the UK, but almost everything I come across points to the US/Canada/UK being similar in nearly everything) college is still clearly the path to take if you want to make the most money in life, even with the added debt burdens in recent decades.

There are two issues with that.  First, most young people know this so enter college... but not all of them finish.  The major university here in town, ASU, has less than half of its students graduating in six years once they start school.  Those that don't are still stuck with the debt burden of attending for however long they did but coupled to employment that is likely far less than if they had finished their degrees.

Second, despite what folks here on TN often say, the majority of degrees awarded every year in the US are the right ones that you would think would lead to work.  Except... even in fields like STEM a third of graduates never find work relevant to their degree.  Yes, some of those folks probably still make good money in other fields but the indication seems clear that even if you get the right degree you're not guaranteed to make it.  The conclusion, surprisingly, is that we're awarding far more degrees than the job market can handle.  Rather depressing considering the alternative is less pay over one's lifetime compared to those, on average, who did get their degree.

[Ssnake]

Thomas Sowell pointed out long ago that everybody standing up in a theater doesn't mean that everybody gets a better view. And yet, universities push the narrative that you need an academic background to succeed in life - because, duh, mo' students == mo' money for them.