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UK Politics (23 Viewers)
- Thread starter Red
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Making shit is sooo "Industrial Revolution"-era thinking. The information economy is obliterating the value in the manufacturing economy. We still need goods, but we have so many inexpensive options for someone else to fulfill them. Anyone who thinks they can prop up the middle class by re-investing in manufacturing is trying to put the horse back into the barn after it's long left. That game is over.
The one consistent thing between the industrial and information economies is the question of scale. If you cannot scale what you do over lots of people, you're stuck being a peasant craftsman with a handful of loyal customers. The suit tailors in Napoli make the most awesome stuff, but they're barely squeaking by while the mass production suit-makers are making a killing.
If you cannot find a way to scale or leverage what you do over more people, the modern economy will leave you behind.
The one consistent thing between the industrial and information economies is the question of scale. If you cannot scale what you do over lots of people, you're stuck being a peasant craftsman with a handful of loyal customers. The suit tailors in Napoli make the most awesome stuff, but they're barely squeaking by while the mass production suit-makers are making a killing.
If you cannot find a way to scale or leverage what you do over more people, the modern economy will leave you behind.
What's certainly a problem though, is that there can be no objectively fair balance of renumeration and distribution of wealth or income, simply because fairness is a very subjective concept.
The current situation however, at least in my opinion, can hardly be described or even adequately just or fair by most of the defintions of these terms. The system is as rigged in the favour of the already wealthy as it has ever been since the end of WWII, and the idea of equal opportunity that most of the defendants of the liberal economic policies largely responsible for these conditions are often seeing as the principal ideal of fairness, is starting to look more and more like some sort of cynical joke.
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What I believe will be a rather important issue in the long run is the ever bigger share of manufacturing employment taken over by mechanisation. In theory, the proportion of labour not being able to be done by any sort of machinery is extremely little, and with the rate of technology improving exponentionally, there could easily be a severe lack of employment opportunities, simply because a complete integration of all of this workforce in other sectors, such as services or highly skilled manual labour, will hardly be possible.
This is of course all extremely speculative, and the concequences for current policies are negligible, but continuing this thought, a sort of unconditional basic income could easily become a necessary implemention into any society not willing to face huge rates of unemployment, poverty, and ultimately social unrest and violent uprisings.
The current situation however, at least in my opinion, can hardly be described or even adequately just or fair by most of the defintions of these terms. The system is as rigged in the favour of the already wealthy as it has ever been since the end of WWII, and the idea of equal opportunity that most of the defendants of the liberal economic policies largely responsible for these conditions are often seeing as the principal ideal of fairness, is starting to look more and more like some sort of cynical joke.
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What I believe will be a rather important issue in the long run is the ever bigger share of manufacturing employment taken over by mechanisation. In theory, the proportion of labour not being able to be done by any sort of machinery is extremely little, and with the rate of technology improving exponentionally, there could easily be a severe lack of employment opportunities, simply because a complete integration of all of this workforce in other sectors, such as services or highly skilled manual labour, will hardly be possible.
This is of course all extremely speculative, and the concequences for current policies are negligible, but continuing this thought, a sort of unconditional basic income could easily become a necessary implemention into any society not willing to face huge rates of unemployment, poverty, and ultimately social unrest and violent uprisings.
How does one value contribution? In what objective, numeratively measurable way do artists contribute? Is contribution based on necessity, or how much a skill or profession is needed or based on supply and demand? Who contributes more, farmers, doctors or actors?
There could be a balance of renumaration based on contribution for sure, in many ways there is one in place right now, but there can never be an objective balance.
There could be a balance of renumaration based on contribution for sure, in many ways there is one in place right now, but there can never be an objective balance.
It's never been fair. And those with the upper hand always set the rules. That's been true since life first formed on this planet, and we shouldn't pretend that those forces suddenly do not exist anymore.
In 10 years we could see lots of taxi and personal drivers unemployed, for example. That stuff happens. But the productivity pressures on a growth economy are always about doing more with less. So you often either become redundant or aid the process of making someone else redundant. To fight that for reasons of unemployment is kind of a loser's game, though -- you create an unsustainable economy with people paid to essentially be idle and not assault anyone.
To play a little devil's advocate here, isn't there also a balance of abundance and scarcity to consider here? Namely, that societies where food and resources are scarce should be disincentivized from producing more offspring to create even worse competition for dwindling resources?
Humanness unfortunately has nothing to do with it. Mass starvation is nature's way of saying to stop having so many babies and creating more mouths to feed. Pushing that out further by creating leverage to prop up unsustainable populations only makes the inevitable collapse even more potentially deadly and tragic, like inflating an unsustainable economic bubble.
In 10 years we could see lots of taxi and personal drivers unemployed, for example. That stuff happens. But the productivity pressures on a growth economy are always about doing more with less. So you often either become redundant or aid the process of making someone else redundant. To fight that for reasons of unemployment is kind of a loser's game, though -- you create an unsustainable economy with people paid to essentially be idle and not assault anyone.
To play a little devil's advocate here, isn't there also a balance of abundance and scarcity to consider here? Namely, that societies where food and resources are scarce should be disincentivized from producing more offspring to create even worse competition for dwindling resources?
Humanness unfortunately has nothing to do with it. Mass starvation is nature's way of saying to stop having so many babies and creating more mouths to feed. Pushing that out further by creating leverage to prop up unsustainable populations only makes the inevitable collapse even more potentially deadly and tragic, like inflating an unsustainable economic bubble.
Of course not, that's not what I'm implying here at all, a certain degree of unfairness will always persist. However, this does not mean that we shouldn't try to reduce it as much as it is possible to us.
I'm not talking about the time 10 years from now, but far further in the future, after hypothetical, but still very likely (in my books) advances in technology have rendered a significant proportion of manual labour employment redundant, inlcuding simple service jobs such as grocery clerks. Again, I stress the highly speculative and theoretic aspect of this thought, it's really more a thought experiment than a concrete proposal.
Such a situation however would pretty much unprecedented in the whole history of mankind. The products previously produced by the labourers, will of course still be produced, just much, much less labour-intensive, as you would really only need to provide maintanence and energy.
This means, that the output, the real material wealth of the society still exists - however, a large portion of the population would be without employment, and assuming that the service sector does not completely incorporate this workforce, which would seem rather ambitious to me, a rather large disparity between the number of jobs demanded and supplied would be the case. This results, when left alone to the forces of the free labour market, first of all in low wages, and secondly, a high rate of unemployment.
So while the improvements in technology would have greatly improved output, and reduced the need for much of the labour, thus making the society much wealthier, large portions of the population would see their conditions deteriorate. To counter this, some sort of balancing mechanism would have to be established.
I know that much of the problems I have described has already occurred during the great wave of mechanisation of agriculture, where the manufactioral and service sector has indeed absorbed at least the vast majority of the people previously employed in agriculture, but I'm rather sceptical as to wether the same would occurr in the, again rather likely case of what I have described above.
This unconditional basic income, or whatever you want to call it, would in another sense only appeal to my personal sense of fairness as well - there is no reason, why this wealth that is created anyways, should not be profitable to all of society, especially when due to a above mentioned divergence between employment opportunities and workforce it is not possible for everyone to work even if they were willing to. Of course, there should still be financial incentive to take up work, meaning the level of basic income should always be below wages.
There would be so much more to this, and the interesting thing about this idea is that much of the society I described is already reality, but this has gotten wayyyyyyy longer than I intended already
Currently however starvation has very little to do with an unsufficient amount of food being produced, but with its distribution.
And the the argument that the starvation we observe today is a natural way of balancing out population, is empirically just nonsense, as the counries most severely suffering from it are recording the highest rates of population growth, while the richest countries, the ones most abundant in the availability of food and other rescources, stagnate or decline.
Besides that, it's in my purely personal opinion extremely cynical and rather cruel.
I'm not talking about the time 10 years from now, but far further in the future, after hypothetical, but still very likely (in my books) advances in technology have rendered a significant proportion of manual labour employment redundant, inlcuding simple service jobs such as grocery clerks. Again, I stress the highly speculative and theoretic aspect of this thought, it's really more a thought experiment than a concrete proposal.
Such a situation however would pretty much unprecedented in the whole history of mankind. The products previously produced by the labourers, will of course still be produced, just much, much less labour-intensive, as you would really only need to provide maintanence and energy.
This means, that the output, the real material wealth of the society still exists - however, a large portion of the population would be without employment, and assuming that the service sector does not completely incorporate this workforce, which would seem rather ambitious to me, a rather large disparity between the number of jobs demanded and supplied would be the case. This results, when left alone to the forces of the free labour market, first of all in low wages, and secondly, a high rate of unemployment.
So while the improvements in technology would have greatly improved output, and reduced the need for much of the labour, thus making the society much wealthier, large portions of the population would see their conditions deteriorate. To counter this, some sort of balancing mechanism would have to be established.
I know that much of the problems I have described has already occurred during the great wave of mechanisation of agriculture, where the manufactioral and service sector has indeed absorbed at least the vast majority of the people previously employed in agriculture, but I'm rather sceptical as to wether the same would occurr in the, again rather likely case of what I have described above.
This unconditional basic income, or whatever you want to call it, would in another sense only appeal to my personal sense of fairness as well - there is no reason, why this wealth that is created anyways, should not be profitable to all of society, especially when due to a above mentioned divergence between employment opportunities and workforce it is not possible for everyone to work even if they were willing to. Of course, there should still be financial incentive to take up work, meaning the level of basic income should always be below wages.
There would be so much more to this, and the interesting thing about this idea is that much of the society I described is already reality, but this has gotten wayyyyyyy longer than I intended already
Currently however starvation has very little to do with an unsufficient amount of food being produced, but with its distribution.
And the the argument that the starvation we observe today is a natural way of balancing out population, is empirically just nonsense, as the counries most severely suffering from it are recording the highest rates of population growth, while the richest countries, the ones most abundant in the availability of food and other rescources, stagnate or decline.
Besides that, it's in my purely personal opinion extremely cynical and rather cruel.
No I just understand that none of the mainstream parties care about the people, they're just a agglomeration of self-interested and self-serving career politicians who care more about interest groups than about the mandates they are supposedly given. Look at the British political class, they're basically all Oxbridge graduates from rich families.
All these parties essentially agree on the main points (de-industrialization, destruction of borders, mass immigration) and their only sources of disagreements are trivial issues like gay marriage and affirmation action. They constitute the extreme center, encompassing both center-left and center-right, and they are essentially identical.
As for the Green Party, it may have some interesting ideas but its insistence on absolutely worthless wind turbines make them particularly ludicrous.
If you live far enough away from a fault zone, why not? No inherent risks plague the plants apart from inside meltdowns.
Please research how the unions destroyed Detroit.
Nope. What happened?
That is correct, but that is why our economy is doomed, we don't produce any physical goods. You lot in California might produce goods in the technology sector, but the rest of the country does not have the capability or the demand to do such a thing. As you know, everything else has been off shored.
Economies of scale to the point of absolute profit maximization only occur where there are oligopolies or concentrated monopolistic competition. You might have that in your field, but if that is all we have to sustain our economy, we are obviously in trouble.
The big issue here is that the Democrats support a centralized system where the big firms rule the world. The sheer amount of regulations kill small firms, while large corporations can manage the costs. SOX for instance kills smaller firms in regulatory costs. Thank goodness for Bush though, as he did allow companies to use more leverage.
I'm abroad, so at the moment I can only vote in US and Canadian elections, but while in the UK I can vote in US, Canadian and local UK elections, which is kind of cool. I think it's good that Commonwealth citizens can vote in local elections in the UK.
This sentimental longing for the good ol' days when people used to "make stuff" (physical goods) sounds identical to the sentimentality that people had during the industrial revolution when people longed for the days when everyone was an agricultural farmer of their own food.
That leverage and scale I speak of isn't just a "technology sector" thing, though. I mentioned the example of just suit-makers. It runs through everything from professional sports to musicians to politicians to writers to medical specialists to YouTube video producers and perhaps soon to even professions such as teachers.
I will agree that I am concerned about the low rates of small business creation these days in general. And I'm always glad we have de-regulationists to keep regulation fans in check. But a lot (though certainly not all) regulations are the product of abuses, lawsuits, and unnecessarily dead people. There are reasons I shouldn't trust my barber to remove my appendix.
If you ever fill out the paperwork to purchase a home in this country, you pretty much know that every sheet of paper you sign is because someone in the past screwed over someone else because of the issue set forth upon it.
Simpler systems are a lot easier to optimize, certainly. But they usually also end up pushing costs onto other systems that must bear the burden for their blissful ignorance.
That leverage and scale I speak of isn't just a "technology sector" thing, though. I mentioned the example of just suit-makers. It runs through everything from professional sports to musicians to politicians to writers to medical specialists to YouTube video producers and perhaps soon to even professions such as teachers.
I will agree that I am concerned about the low rates of small business creation these days in general. And I'm always glad we have de-regulationists to keep regulation fans in check. But a lot (though certainly not all) regulations are the product of abuses, lawsuits, and unnecessarily dead people. There are reasons I shouldn't trust my barber to remove my appendix.
If you ever fill out the paperwork to purchase a home in this country, you pretty much know that every sheet of paper you sign is because someone in the past screwed over someone else because of the issue set forth upon it.
Simpler systems are a lot easier to optimize, certainly. But they usually also end up pushing costs onto other systems that must bear the burden for their blissful ignorance.
Breakdown of how different groups of people voted:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/20/scottish-independence-lord-ashcroft-poll
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And, predictably, while the rest of the country has acknowledged the result in a civilised manner, the Weegies had to have a fight.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/20/scottish-independence-lord-ashcroft-poll
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And, predictably, while the rest of the country has acknowledged the result in a civilised manner, the Weegies had to have a fight.
For me to properly answer that would take longer than I can be bothered typing for but in summary:
Having members of the EDL and UVF come to Glasgow to join up with other unionist bigots and riot in the city centre (highlights including setting fire to the generator for The Glasgow Herald (as I'm sure you know the only pro-independence newspaper), nazi salutes, burning of saltires, verbally and physically abusing people with Yes badges on including little girls and singing of Rangers songs unrelated to politics but related to bigotry) does not constitute Weegies having a fight. I was really upset by what happened on Friday night, and also upset that the council had given permission for SIX orange walks in Glasgow on the Saturday.
Scotland's shame. I don't even
Having members of the EDL and UVF come to Glasgow to join up with other unionist bigots and riot in the city centre (highlights including setting fire to the generator for The Glasgow Herald (as I'm sure you know the only pro-independence newspaper), nazi salutes, burning of saltires, verbally and physically abusing people with Yes badges on including little girls and singing of Rangers songs unrelated to politics but related to bigotry) does not constitute Weegies having a fight. I was really upset by what happened on Friday night, and also upset that the council had given permission for SIX orange walks in Glasgow on the Saturday.
Scotland's shame. I don't even