Trump

[Deckard]

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth...

Andrew Yang makes some sense.

Sense ? Trump ? American politics ? Does not compute ..although fair enough the Uk and Brexit takes some beating but as I have an Irish passport na, na, na na , na !!

[tufty]

so that there aren't so many idiots around, living "what have I got to lose?" shit lives

Surely there would still be more or less the same number of (admittedly better educated) idiots?

[Absolute_Zero]

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth...

Andrew Yang makes some sense.

Sense ? Trump ? American politics ? Does not compute

You'd have to at least watch it, Rick.

..although fair enough the Uk and Brexit takes some beating but as I have an Irish passport na, na, na na , na !!

I doubt those twin shocks of 2016 were entirely coincidental.

[merman]

Trump couldn't even stick to facts about declaring a national emergency when he declared a national emergency. He's even extended emergency powers Obama brought in to deal with Mexican cartels.

Fact is, fewer and fewer Mexicans have been crossing the border AND those immigrants are committing less crime than the average American.

[IronGiant]

Trump couldn't even stick to facts about declaring a national emergency when he declared a national emergency. He's even extended emergency powers Obama brought in to deal with Mexican cartels.

Fact is, fewer and fewer Mexicans have been crossing the border AND those immigrants are committing less crime than the average American.

Can't say that I blame them - after all, who in their right mind would want to move to America while Trump is in charge?

[PFVA]

It appears even the butterflies will have to have a wall in their sanctuary and loose the water levee:

https://www.texasobserver.org/butterfly ... all-texas/

[snaff]

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth...

Andrew Yang makes some sense.

They tried that in the UK, it didn't work. Gordon Brown put half the population on benefits. If you give people a thousand pounds a month it just pushes rents up by a thousand a month. Brown's 'tax credits' and housing bennies just transfer money from tax payers to Labour-voting landlords while the hapless beneficiaries in the middle of it are conned into state dependence and voting for more of the same to survive. This universal income stuff is just the same kind of scam designed to prop up the failed status quo.

Notice they never explain where the money will come from. Okay Andrew Yang says it's your 'dividend' paid to you for owning part of the country. Sadly the US, like the UK doesn't actually get paid any dividends because it's massively in debt and rather has to pay to service that debt using wealth generated from the continued daily labour of its citizens. Governments could have built up a sovereign wealth fund from which they could have paid real dividends, but they chose not to and now they're terrified that private robots are going to decide who gets to play from now on.

Luckily their dystopian predictions, like all leftist beliefs rest on misanthropy, in this case the belief that human beings are fundamentally useless and have nothing of value to offer one another. In absence of daft government schemes I think people will be just fine.

[Harlequin]

The Universal Basic income does not appear to have had any of the above effects in Finland, nor in most other trials conducted around the world in recent years.

[KlaxonCow]

Luckily their dystopian predictions, like all leftist beliefs rest on misanthropy, in this case the belief that human beings are fundamentally useless and have nothing of value to offer one another.

Umm, no, it's based more on this sort of thing:



Or this sort of thing:



Albeit in their infancy, these things already exist.

And they have existed for a while. I remember watching a YouTuber discussing how they'd met "Twitch Australia". Yes, they'd met all of "Twitch Australia", because "Twitch Australia" was, at that time, just one single person. Basically, their spokesperson to give any needed interviews in Australia. But their actual operation in Australia exists on servers in other people's data centres.

Automation is already displacing jobs. And the key word there is "displacing" because, no, it's not "Robbie the robot" sitting at your desk on a Monday morning and you're told "you're fired", like some futuristic episode of the Apprentice.

It's the subtle job loss that comes from everyone having email - so no need for a "mail department" - and everyone having Microsoft Office - so there goes "the print department" - and Amazon having "fulfilment" robots wandering about their massive warehouses.

And it's not that humans can't do things for other humans. Of course not. It's that the robots can do it way cheaper and way faster, with productivity through the roof - as these things do not require sleep or holidays or sick days - that why would you hire a human to do things for other humans, when you can a robot do ten people's jobs for ABSOLUTELY NO WAGE AT ALL.

This is better than slave labour. Slaves still have to eat and shit and sleep. Robots - a word that, by the way, derives from the Czech for "slave / servant" - do it better and ask for no pay rises ever.

If you're of a fiscally conservative mindset then you surely already comprehend. "Free market capitalism" demands that you use these robots - because, by the way, if you don't, then your rival will and they'll kick your arse into the middle of next week without breaking a sweat, as these robots can and will come to easily out-compete human beings in most everything.

And, no, this isn't actually dystopian anyway. Because, ultimately, in the long term view, this is all very much to the good.

The robots will free the human race from all labour. The dream we've been chasing since the invention of fire actually coming true. Labour-saving devices that are so labour saving, you are not obliged to lift a finger to do anything whatsoever at all.

Of course, you can choose to do so anyway. You can create art, just because you enjoy it. I'm sure that in this future world of robots doing it all, then selling "human-made" items - hand-crafted stuff - will be all the rage and the fashion. Creative people will have stuff to do, as they've always had, as they're creative and make their own work. But, admittedly, not so sure what the overwhelming majority of everyone else will be doing exactly.

Indeed, I've advocated for renewable energy before. And the point is that this all fits into the bigger picture. As I've said on such rants about renewables, I have more than enough reasons to advocate for renewables that never once goes anywhere near "climate change". It's a bloody good idea for a whole range of reasons, even if fossil fuels produced absolutely zero carbon and zero pollution.

And one of those reasons is the coming automation. What do robots eat? Robots "eat" electricity.

So, you can imagine a robot workforce that, already, requires no wages. And then you're powering them all, in the factory, with a massive array of solar panels on the factory roof. Okay, the initial purchase of that massive array is money, but the actual energy - from sunlight - costs nothing.

Of course, things will need to be fixed here and there, so your running costs are not actually ever going to be zero. But the fact that we could conceivably get so close to zero - "negligible running cost" - on an entire factory that never sleeps and never slows down...

Self-driving trucks delivering the materials to the factory and taking the product away, all autonomous electric vehicles that are charged back up on that free renewable power, while their parked and being loaded up or unloaded - by robots, of course - ready for their next run.

The materials themselves, of course, mined by mining robots. Powered up by a wind farm, say.

There's still a long ways to go, yes, but this is a perfectly achievable goal to ramp up productivity through the roof, while reducing running costs to chump change.

The Industrial Revolution never stopped, you know. This is the next phase in that revolution and one that can completely re-write how the entire world works - just as, indeed, the original Industrial Revolution freed humanity from perpetually malnourished agricultural serfdom and filled the cities, this next phase of the revolution can have at least as massive an impact, if not much further.

This is not "dystopian". It's actually perfectly Utopian.

The problem is that we live in a moneyed world. Where folks do jobs to earn wages. And this future is a money-less world, where it's no longer obliged for anyone to do anything.

And how the hell do you get from a world with money to a world without money smoothly? Because, of course, halfway along, you're going to have a world of "half money" and "half jobs". The transition is potentially problematic, because if your job goes to the robots, but yet food still costs some money - then how do you afford the food? Some things are easier to automate than others, so the switch over is going to be irregularly-shaped.

Note that I've not even mentioned AI yet. I'm just talking physical automation. What it's already been doing to the factory workers for decades.

But AI means that you're not at all "safe" from this in your cushy middle-class job. Accounts is just maths. Computers are really good at maths. Retail is already online - and I know your high street is no different from anyone else's, with empty and boarded up shops. The factories already have robots. Amazon already have robots in their warehouses. Customer service by machine already happens, as you know when you phone them up and get asked by a robot to "press 1 for... press 2 for..." and if that gets sophisticated enough to not be a poor man's choice next to human assistance for 99% of queries, then it'll all go that way - because, notice, you never have to wait for the robot, it can give instant dedication to every single caller and zero wait times.

Robot hands are better than a human surgeon's hands. Far more precise (and way easier to keep 100% sterile at all times - you can literally dunk the bloody thing in bleach, which you couldn't sensibly do to a human but the machine won't care). Again, we're still not quite there, but once it's "as good" - it doesn't even have to be better - then the robot makes more sense, because it can perform surgeries 24 / 7 and never tires. It could eat through all our "waiting lists" in a blink of an eye.

This is a Utopian vision. This could conceivably reduce the costs of everything down to levels where, basically, the very notion of "currency" is threatened - that "money-less" Star-Trek-alike vision.

But there are two obvious problems. Our economies work on money, so the gradual eradication of money is going to be a bit of a game-changer, and we have to work out how the hell you manage that transition. The other is that we live on a ball, and that ball does not have infinite resources. One good thing about that thing called "money" was that it controlled and apportioned resources - perhaps not always fairly, granted, but it was a system to manage this sort of thing.

My suggestion on the first, as I say, is things like renewable power. We have to make the basics - the fundamental necessities - "money-less" first. Is electricity more fundamental than food? No, not at all. But we have a solution - renewables - for energy, so we can at least get working on that. I have no solution for food - though that really needs to be "priority #1", in the old "bread and circuses" equation - so I would want to fix that one first, but I have zero idea how at the moment. The one we can get to work on right now, though, is energy, through renewables.

And my suggestion on the second has to be that we send the robots to space. Space robots to go space mining. Get resources from beyond our little ball. There is plenty out there. And, yes, I'm very aware of how "easier said than done" that one is, but it eventually needs to be done, so it's got to be said.

[gravy]

They tried that in the UK, it didn't work. Gordon Brown put half the population on benefits. If you give people a thousand pounds a month it just pushes rents up by a thousand a month. Brown's 'tax credits' and housing bennies just transfer money from tax payers to Labour-voting landlords while the hapless beneficiaries in the middle of it are conned into state dependence and voting for more of the same to survive. This universal income stuff is just the same kind of scam designed to prop up the failed status quo.

That firebrand of socialism, Margaret Thatcher, brought in Housing Benefit in 1984.

Under her Stalinist reign of terror, she forced the sale of social housing, kick-started a buy to let boom and laid the groundwork for the inevitable, recurring housing bubbles.

She gave away assets to create and win the votes of a new middle class and those that became landlords were paid privilege through housing benefit.

You're right that new Labour doubled down on the Thatcher's legacy

[venusian]

Luckily their dystopian predictions, like all leftist beliefs rest on misanthropy, in this case the belief that human beings are fundamentally useless and have nothing of value to offer one another.

That's pretty much exactly the opposite of the motivation for UBE.

[Rhythm]

Further to all Klaxon's points, remember that a lot of "work" that goes on these days can be automated without physical, moving robots too. Huge amounts of call-centre and office work is being automated and scripted to run with a bare minimum of human intervention. It's already happening in the UK and overseas and it's not going to slow down

The notion of housing benefits putting up rent and passing what is essentially tax down to shitty landlords - totally true. In the same way that "help to buy" has basically added 25% to the price of new builds in the UK where it was intended to help first time buyers find a deposit for a property.

Benefits, nationalisation, wealth distribution are not bad things by any stretch. But when badly handled in a 2-party political system it leads to problems (of course). We in the UK now spend 2-3 times the tax on the railways since they've been nationalised. Yes the days of British Rail meant we had some shitty services but I don't see any train users particularly loving what we have now, especially with cunts like Branson in the mix.

[snaff]

The Universal Basic income does not appear to have had any of the above effects in Finland, nor in most other trials conducted around the world in recent years.

They always do these small scale studies and then give people a questionnaire at the end saying 'did you enjoy getting free money y/n' and claim it was a massive success. To scale 560 euros a month up to 5 million Finns would cost 33 billion/annum which means raising the tax rate by about 60% to an average of 80%, even before the workers and businesses quit work/quit the country. Didn't they do a bigger experiment like that in the Soviet Union - "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us".

[snaff]

They tried that in the UK, it didn't work. Gordon Brown put half the population on benefits. If you give people a thousand pounds a month it just pushes rents up by a thousand a month. Brown's 'tax credits' and housing bennies just transfer money from tax payers to Labour-voting landlords while the hapless beneficiaries in the middle of it are conned into state dependence and voting for more of the same to survive. This universal income stuff is just the same kind of scam designed to prop up the failed status quo.

That firebrand of socialism, Margaret Thatcher, brought in Housing Benefit in 1984.

Under her Stalinist reign of terror, she forced the sale of social housing, kick-started a buy to let boom and laid the groundwork for the inevitable, recurring housing bubbles.

She gave away assets to create and win the votes of a new middle class and those that became landlords were paid privilege through housing benefit.

You're right that new Labour doubled down on the Thatcher's legacy

Yet people don't believe me when I say the Conservatives are big government lefties.

[PFVA]

Even though i like him i think he is a bit over the age to become President:

Bernie Sanders announces second US presidential bid

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46965281