Trump

[snaff]

Trump's done alright. Rather him than sleepy Joe and his corrupt family with all their dodgy Ukraine dealings.

Trump has his finger on the pulse of public sentiment and he knows that people are fed up of the economy being hollowed out to support communist China in the name of creating a global slave labour class. He's the perfect figurehead for bringing manufacturing back west.

[Dio]

Remember everyone, don't feed the trolls.

[KlaxonCow]

He's the perfect figurehead for bringing manufacturing back west.

Manufacturing will return - but not in the way you're thinking.

There is a way to undercut even slave labour: Robots.

Robots don't need wages, food, shelter, healthcare, employee rights or anything else costly and expensive like that.

They do require electricity to power, but this can be addressed by renewable technologies - the factory in which the robots toil could have its vast roof space paved with solar panels, hooked up to a small shed by the side of the factory that houses a large storage battery (which captures daylight from solar to power things at night too and also acts as a UPS for the factory - because none of this excludes the possibility of still having it hooked up to the Grid and using Grid electricity in the usual manner, so if it's not that sunny, the factory's storage battery can pull some cheaper off-peak electricity from the Grid overnight to top things up).

Sure, there's investment costs there to set that all up. But, hey, if you're building a factory of robots, the cost of the solar roof and storage battery are minor costs in the grand scheme of things (particularly because battery and solar tech has been rapidly dropping in price, as the "economies of scale" are kicking in for the sector).

And the point is that there are no "fuel costs" to solar energy. Sure, there's an upfront cost to move into a fully automated world, but then the running costs are "too cheap to meter".

As the robots can work tirelessly 24 / 7 at maximum productivity, without costing a single cent in wages, food, shelter, healthcare or anything else like that, while renewables can potentially eradicate any "fuel costs" to keeping them all up and running as well.

We can see automated vehicles - trucks with "autopilot" - coming online and these could run continuously (no need for rest breaks or anything) to bring materials to the factory and to take produce from the factory to where it's needed.

And this is where we could imagine - beyond our example factory - a whole ecosystem of automation. There could be robots at the mines, digging up the materials and loading automated trucks to take it to the factories, where robots churn out the products constantly, for more automated trucks to be loaded up to take it to the Amazon-like warehouses - which are already getting more and more automated, in this fashion, right now - which will then load up the automated delivery vans to take the products - ordered online - to people's front doors.

And the basic gist of the concept here is that, from resources in the ground to a product brought to your front door, not a single human being is required.

I mean, this is not to say that there won't be human beings. There in a supervisory capacity. There to go in and fix the robots, when their parts wear out. On a human level, it might be nice to have a human being ride with the automated delivery van - merely to be the friendly face at the door, handing you your package and getting your signature (though, come on, we can certainly improve on signatures for delivery confirmation going forward as well).

Although, if you eliminate humans entirely from that too, there could be benefits. Robots don't have lives or any need to sleep, so deliveries could be made all day and all night. Most specifically, if you are one of those humans who still possesses a day job in the automated era, then you can schedule the delivery to come in the evenings, when you're at home. No need to take a day off work, waiting in for the delivery.

Indeed, houses could perhaps be adapted to have "parcel boxes" where packages could be securely dropped off by the robots and no interaction is needed at all. It's just there, in your parcel box, when you get home.

This is where things are headed. All the building blocks already exist, and various companies are already using components of this - it just needs to get slightly better with the AI, which is being developed, to be truly "human free", and be joined up.

You've probably already seen the Google demo of their digital assistant that can make and answer phone calls. That's already not too far from taking over all customer support call centre jobs too. If you've got any complaints or need support for your products and services, the machines are always there 24/7/365 to answer your queries, make adjustments to your orders, provide technical support or manage refunds - and there's no waiting 45 minutes, listening to crap pop music, for an operator to be available. "Operators" are spawned processes on a server somewhere, and it can handle tens of thousands or more of conversations with customers simultaneously.

Renewable power, automated electric delivery vehicles, robots and additive manufacture (3D printing). Automate the whole lot, from farms and mines and quarries, to bring it to your front door. The robots do it all - and that whole chain, in terms of "running costs", is all "too cheap to meter".

And - oh, yes - there's a big fundamental problem with this model. If no-one has a job, then where does all the money to pay for anything come from? Money is a token system for our interpersonal debt with each other. But if the robots do it all - and we're not required to compensate them for the work they do for us - then there is no more interpersonal debt between humans anymore.

Basically, this model is the death of money. When everything works this way, we'll be living in that Star Trek "we have no need for money" future.

Indeed, on that score, we can expand this further - because humans are venturing out into space once more. There are already companies set up for space mining, albeit none of them are yet doing it. But the goal is there. Because the prize is rather insane.

When the early Earth was forming, it was molten. As it cooled down, then a crust formed, creating a physical barrier. But, before that, heavy things simply sank. The core of our planet is mostly molten iron. The point I'm making here is that, until the crust formed on the planet, all heavy metals actually sank down to the core.

Therefore, most heavy materials - such as gold and iron and the like, which we've been mining up here on the surface of our planet - arrived here by asteroid later on.

The point being that all we've ever mined on this planet has come from asteroids crashing into our planet over 4.5 billion years. Everything we've ever had - including, by the prevailing theories, even our planet's vast oceans - were a later asteroid delivery.

The amount of stuff up there, in the asteroid belt and beyond, is on a scale that makes everything we've ever known look utterly puny and tiny in comparison.

You think our "water world" of Earth has a lot of H2O? Nah, the vast Rings of Saturn are largely water ice, and they're truly gargantuan. Not that I prescribe we actually scoop up the Rings of Saturn - they should surely be left alone as "heritage sites" - but just trying to give a sense that what's up there is a resource revolution on a scale that's unimaginable compared to anything we've ever previously had in all of human history.

So, again, you create your mining robots. At our permanently manned Moon colony, of course, because then you don't have to worry about gravity wells so much. And these fly out into the asteroid belt, mine up materials and bring them back to Earth. Handing it over to the robots at the factory to build the things.)

If you thought the Industrial Revolution was at all impressive, then I have a song by Bachman Turner Overdrive that I need to play you.

Now, I ain't painting an idyllic picture here. How the fuck does humanity seamlessly transition from a money-ful world to a money-less existence? Fuck knows. Both ends of the spectrum are workable unto themselves, but the in-between states are incompatible. How do you pay for the money-ful things that still exist, as large chunks of your economy go automated and "money-less"?

Folks have talked about a "basic universal income" and that's a reasonable short-term solution. But it is arithmetically doomed as a concept. Because when there are more people in need of the UBI than there are remaining people in work paying taxes - remember, robots don't have wages but that also means they ain't paying any income taxes either - then how do you square that circle? Say, 10% of humanity still has a job paying taxes, to support 90% of everyone else? It doesn't arithmetically work. It can work initially, when there's more taxpayers remaining than folks on UBI. But it'll eventually cross the tipping point where you need to pay out more UBI to the population than there are taxes coming back in.

And, yes, for "free market" advocates, there's some philosophical issues here too. In that, yes, this is all moving towards a kind of "techno-communism". Though it will be - and is - capitalists who're bringing this to reality because, as we mentioned right at the start, robot labour undercuts even slave labour.

Amazon has made some of the biggest strides towards automation - and Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet. The route to "maximum profit" is dragging us towards this potential future, even if, yes, that future will ultimately kill of the concept of "money", as we know it now, entirely.

But, until then, it's riches galore. If you find a few gold-rich asteroids up there in the asteroid belt, then you could be mining up more gold from there than exists in total on the whole of planet Earth. When this shit starts happening, we're going to have to get used to a new term: Trillionaires.

(But this is, economically, kind of the point. If you massively increase the money supply, the available resources, the labour pool (robots run 24/7/365, remember, with perfect productivity and zero need for breaks, so their labour easily dwarfs all human labour into comparative nothingness), then the value of a single dollar - or whatever currency unit you wish to use - gets less and less and less. That's why it ultimately leads to "money-less-ness", as supply-and-demand economics renders the value of our money to "too cheap to meter" levels.)

When folks complain about "immigrants" or "globalisation", they're scapegoating a red herring.

It's got absolutely nothing to do with that. Trump might have his pulse on the erroneous conclusions of the man in the street, but the man in the street has simply got it wrong.

It's not brown people stealing our jobs. It's the machines.

And you might not notice this because, sure, you don't show up to work on a Monday and find "Robbie the Robot" is sitting at your desk. It's not an obvious one-for-one replacement like that.

But it's rather that jobs are being lost in the cracks between things.

In ye olde days, a company might have a "printing department". But, these days, it's all paperless and there's a printer in the corner of the office. They might have had a "mail department" but it's all done by email and video conferencing now. You might have had a secretary to schedule your calendar - but now you sort your own cloud-based calendar yourself, and it's available to everyone to schedule in their own appointments and so forth.

It's not "Robbie the Robot" coming in and directly stealing your job. It's that automation is allowing one person to do the job that used to take 10 people to do. That's how this is whittling down the numbers and us humans are struggling to economically exist in this growing automated economy.

Take, for example, Indian call centres. No-one is actually immigrating into the UK there. They're all staying put in India. But, through technology, they can steal the whole English-speaking world's phone support jobs. As an Indian is way cheaper to employ than anyone in the West.

But, hey, don't blame them. Because if you've seen Google's "digital assistant" demo, where a machine phones up to make appointments, then you can see how this tech will eventually take over from the Indian call centres and they'll also all be out of a job soon enough too. Because, as cheap as Indians might be to hire, they're still way more expensive than Google just spinning up a few thousands processes in one of their data centres somewhere.

(Which only boils down to electricity costs, and I know that Google has, in fact, achieved 100% renewable energy for their data centres. Well, okay, some of that is "carbon offset" bollocks. And it fluctuates, as data centre expansion might start taking more electricity until they re-balance it with more renewables. But the point I was making earlier - that there are companies already doing this shit right now - is already a thing. Google trumpet their "100% renewable" achievement in eco-friendly terms for the PR, of course. But the real driving force is that the most massive cost for a data centre is electricity and if you can shift all that to "no fuel cost" renewables then that's a massive economic win. I'm not naive - they're doing it for the profits. It just so happens to also help reduce climate change at the same time anyway, so they're going to mention that in the press releases to look awesome and eco-friendly, of course.)

The man in the street is wrong. It's not "immigrants" and "globalisation" and tax-dodging rich bastards that's really to blame here.

Indeed, as mentioned with the Indian call centres - or, indeed, we could look at what China dumping cheap steel on the world market is doing to the rest of the world's steel production - we can see that, in a globalised world, it's increasingly irrelevant what country a person is in. They don't have to immigrate to the UK to steal your job. They can steal it exactly where they are.

It's a red herring. It's a way for the human mind to visualise its "enemy" - imagining it as a different-skinned invader coming onto your turf - because the reality, that it's computers and machines just chipping away at the edges of employment, is not such a simple thing to visualise. "Robbie the Robot" is not sitting at your desk on Monday morning to give you the obvious clue of "this machine is replacing me". But it's more that new companies don't have "print departments" anymore, they don't have "mail departments" anymore. That they're all doing things "online" and "in the Cloud". That nearly all communication now happens by, well, kind of what we're doing right here and now - digital bits sent over the network.

That's what's undermining how things have always previously worked and is eating into our job security, and increasingly leaving us in this state.

Trump might have his hand on the pulse of these beliefs. But these beliefs are wrong. That's not really what's going on at all - and your big Mexican wall is not going to make a single sodding bit of difference to anything. I mean, nearly all illegal immigrants come in by plane and bus and such - they enter the US perfectly legitimately - but they just "overstay" their visas and never go home.

No, the grand problem here is that something fundamental and revolutionary is happening - I've detailed a "vision" of how automation might go forward and so radically change the world in ways that it's simply never ever seen before in all of human history - but not a single politician out there is addressing it. They're just doing the "brown people stealing your jobs and sleeping with your white women" false flag scapegoat thing. Feeding the myth, not the actual reality.

And I don't really know many of them actually are aware that it's bullshit - but feel it's a useful "Noble Lie" to keep peddling, to avoid any "neo-Luddite" rebellion that could jeopardise this future to be - or actually genuinely believe it / have never thought of it to even realise what's really happening.

I think, in Trump's case, though, he's just "a useful idiot" and totally believes every word he's saying. Because Fox News told him so.

[KlaxonCow]

Remember everyone, don't feed the trolls.

I know, I know. But I wrote the above before you posted that.

(Also, I'm not really feeding the troll. I've just used it as a spring board to talk about something else - the real underlying issue, not the noble myths that the plebs are fobbed off with, that Trump represents, so we continue to fail to see what's actually happening here.)

[gilesgoat]

Remember everyone, don't feed the trolls.

I know, I know. But I wrote the above before you posted that.

(Also, I'm not really feeding the troll. I've just used it as a spring board to talk about something else - the real underlying issue, not the noble myths that the plebs are fobbed off with, that Trump represents, so we continue to fail to see what's actually happening here.)

Why can't we return back to a world of more people working, less people spending, less products around but more quality and instead of shouting "THIS GAME SUCKS" and/or smashing monitors/keyboards over a failed Fortnite Round be playing lovely games on our cherished and cared ZX Spectrum and C64 and let's delete FB and Google forever and "social media" and return back to mail orders and Zzap magazines



/me takes coat


"... I can dream Harold ! ..."

[gravy]

Trump's done alright. Rather him than sleepy Joe and his corrupt family with all their dodgy Ukraine dealings.

Trump has his finger on the pulse of public sentiment and he knows that people are fed up of the economy being hollowed out to support communist China in the name of creating a global slave labour class. He's the perfect figurehead for bringing manufacturing back west.

They're fed up with Trump's economy?

[PFVA]

So where's that SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP THAT UK HAS WITH USA ???

.. your best friend seems a little less friendly now ..

I don't know about that one but i'm very worried.

He called our President today. Officially our government is saying that Trump congratulated Portugal on the efforts to fight the virus and then they talked about business. I'm deeply worried.

Note: Speculation is that the business has to do with the research done by Bial Pharmaceutical here in the country.

Mistery clarified, there is a local lab participating in the production of the medication approved by the FDA yesterday. I'm not sure why Trump had to call the president but whatever.

[Harlequin]

So, again, you create your mining robots. At our permanently manned Moon colony, of course, because then you don't have to worry about gravity wells so much. And these fly out into the asteroid belt, mine up materials and bring them back to Earth. Handing it over to the robots at the factory to build the things.)
…
No, the grand problem here is that something fundamental and revolutionary is happening - I've detailed a "vision" of how automation might go forward and so radically change the world in ways that it's simply never ever seen before in all of human history - but not a single politician out there is addressing it.

Did you know that Trump has officially been trying to open up unimpeded U.S. mining of the moon?

Mistery clarified, there is a local lab participating in the production of the medication approved by the FDA yesterday. I'm not sure why Trump had to call the president but whatever.

Perhaps he wants to buy exclusive rights to it, as he attempted to do for the German vaccine research.

[Barney]

let's delete FB and Google forever and "social media" and return back to mail orders and Zzap magazines

Crash! or GTFO.

[KlaxonCow]

In fairness to Trump, there is one disinfectant that you can ingest.

Alcohol.

Sláinte! I'm having a nice bottle of ale.


(No, unlike the President, I don't actually think alcohol will have any useful effect - someone would have noticed that one by now - and it's probably even a bad idea, immune-system-wise. But, in my case, I'm pretty sure I've already had it with "mild symptoms", so it's too late anyhow.

Oh, and I don't have any shares in a drugs company that produces an anti-malaria drug that all international research has found doesn't really do anything particularly useful - and why would it? In that malaria is caused by a parasite, while SARS 2 is a virus, so it's not even the right type of drug in the first place! - and then trying to promote it with everyone to make a quick buck out of the crisis he's failing to handle, confusingly claiming that he is taking it, but then kept saying "I would take it", in the future tense, later on. So is he taking it or not? And if he is taking it, then why's he taking it? It's not a vaccine and it has some nasty side effects. Take it when you need it, not just randomly for fun.)

[F-ZeroOne]

KlaxonCow beat me to it, but:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52717161

I can see a number of possibilities:

1) Trump is lying.

2) He is being given doses, but either at an incredibly low dosage thats unlikely to have an effect either way, or a placebo and the Doctor administering the placebo has an incredible poker face.

3) He is being given whatever the recommended dose is. This seems to be an incredibly reckless thing to do by the Presidential support team, but if correct suggests a rather slapdash attitude to the potential negative effects on the President.

4) Someone at the White House is scrubbing the "M"s off blue "M&Ms" and telling Trump its medicine.

Obviously, all of the above is speculation, some of it with my tongue in my cheek, but one of them must be close to the truth and holy hell, what a messed up world we live in now.

[gilesgoat]

More common side effects

The more common side effects that can occur with hydroxychloroquine include:

headache
dizziness
diarrhea
stomach cramps
vomiting

Serious side effects

blurred vision or other vision changes, which may be permanent in some cases
heart disease, including heart failure and issues with your heart rhythm; some cases have been fatal
ringing in your ears or hearing loss
angioedema (rapid swelling of your skin)
hives
mild or severe bronchospasm
sore throat
severe hypoglycemia
unusual bleeding or bruising
blue-black skin color
muscle weakness
hair loss or changes in hair color
abnormal mood changes
mental health effects, including suicidal thoughts

.. that's why when we went to Brazil we got Malarone instead .. I think in order from the shittest to to best is Lariam, Plaquenil and Malarone ( which is the most expensive one as well ).

I am not sure the President is taking that, well if he is ... good luck with that, also I think a course would probably take at least 15 days of medication, IIRC Malarone you take 1 pill a day starting 1 week before to leave, 1 week while you are in the suspected areas and 1 week after ...

.. and you may have "side effects and shit" if you are unlucky even YEARS later ..

And yes given that is specifically for certain bacteria not sure what it can do for a virus ...

It is also being studied as a treatment for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), although evidence for its efficacy is lacking.[3][4]

[PFVA]

.......

abnormal mood changes
mental health effects, including suicidal thoughts

[/quote]

Ah! That explains why he seems to be getting worse.

[tufty]

I think you mean "staying the same".

[KlaxonCow]

I'm pretty sure he's just lying.

The fact that, after suggesting he was taking it, he kept saying "I would take it" / "I'd take it" - future tense - thereafter is, you know, the idiot not being a very good liar. Plus, indeed, though Trump himself might be an idiot, the White House medical team should at least comprehend that you don't randomly take drugs with serious side effects for the shits and giggles - it's not a vaccine, so taking it without being infected is just giving yourself serious side effects for zero useful reason. There'd be consequences to poisoning the President of the United States of America - even if the idiot asks for it - that they'd all be keen to very much avoid.

And, as I've said, malaria is not a virus, so why should we think that it has any effect on viruses? International studies have confirmed this, with the general consensus being that it doesn't really do anything. Yes, folks who've taken hydroxychloroquine have recovered from Covid. But, of course, most people do recover from Covid anyway.

Well, here's Rita Wilson - Tom Hanks' wife - who was given hydrochloroquine in Australia and, nope, she's not convinced it helped nor that it's a good idea, in light of the extreme side effects:



What stuns me, as always with Trump, is how he can be so blatant and obvious. This is a President corruptly using his position to be a "snake oil salesman" to the nation, selling them on his version of "magic healing crystals" or a homeopathic remedy, in order to make a quick buck out of it all. And yet, again, absolutely nothing happens.

In his election campaign, Trump did boast that he could shoot someone in the face and absolutely nothing would happen to him. Depressingly, he appears to be entirely right on that.