Whenever I hear about this topic of bringing back jobs, in its various guises, I can't help but think of the village smithy. Should they be brought back too? The futility of resisting this type of change is evident today in sectors like bricks-and-mortar retail. In the next decade, all driving jobs are in the frame to be automated. Things will be better then because it will be hard to blame immigrants for a Google car taking someone's taxi driving job.
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Jesus Christ. The interviewer is a bit full on there, but the picture the man is painting is horrendous. You can't reason with this sort of culture.Originally posted by Tubby Isaacs View PostComment
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Lots of negging from his base re. the omnibus bill on the Twitter comments, which is nice.Comment
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Yeah. State politicians (nearly always Republican) seem to get a free pass. I know I always say this, but I can't believe how the politicians who refused Medicaid expansion keep getting elected. It's not even difficult to compare conservative states where they expanded Medicaid with ones that didn't.Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostComment
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It's interesting how gendered the nostalgia for "real" jobs is. You don't seem to get the same stuff about typing pools. I suppose the typing pool wasn't well paid. But you did get to keep all your fingers.Comment
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That’s because it is very much also a nostalgia for a world in which white men controlled household finances and white women and people of colour were at best marginalised in the workplace.Comment
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Yeah mostly nostalgia, (which is, of course, a sickness.) But there's also a sense craftmanship and regard for hand-skills that's embedded in that attitude too. In my my own field there was once graphic design, typography, art direction and so on, clear and mutually supportive disciplines. Now there's UX, UI and IxD and no one can totally agree what the fuck any of them are.Comment
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Yeah, I can't see too many women being nostalgic for a workplace in which they were not only marginalised but seen as fair game for routine sexual harassment as well.Comment
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Amor, I think that part is more industry specific, and doesn’t particularly apply to the likes of coal mining or many assembly line jobs.
And SdR’s point is important and very well taken. The “control” that many of these people want “back” was always highly problematic for people not like them.Last edited by ursus arctos; 23-03-2018, 20:14.Comment
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Ms D makes an important point above (and deserves thanks for selflessly explore the cesspit that is comments to 45’s tweets).
Cernovich, Prosobiec the Breitbart crowd and many of their avatars all appear to be seriously outraged about this and “certain” that it will cost the GOP the House (and maybe the Senate).
We can always hope.Comment
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Exactly. Just watch the On the Buses Movie tubby. A happy time of full employment, and workplace sexual assault, only made possible by the rigid exclusion of women from all but the most marginal roles in the workforce through bullying, and no people of colour anywhere. Then throw in that a lot of the underlying economic impulse underlying the relative prosperity is driven by a gradual increase in the educational level of the workforce, that is going to gradually level off, leaving people with an expectation of steadily increasing wages that are no longer supported by a rise in productivity, and crucially there is no impetus to respond appropriately (partly because the UK is enmeshed in an eternal class war, which fundamentally gets in the way of literally everything)
It took countries the best part of two decades to get their head around this, The UK and the US responded by utterly crushing the unions, destroying everything, and allowing rich people steal everything, whereas countries like Germany responded appropriately, which is why they still have a massive unionized industrial workforce, that produce an enormous amount of stuff, that everyone wants to buy.Comment
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Compared with the sitcom original, the On The Buses movies look like Citizen Kane. Except with appalling sexism, of course.Comment
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He's lying.Comment
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Well yeah.
Happens every time that his fingers move.Comment
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Yes, this is what I meant. These people have gone from shit jobs to worse ones or none.Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Post
Nobody in the Netherlands wants to bring the coal mines back because the government moved large government agencies to the former coal mining area and employed people there. Not so in the US. It's not called "the rust belt" for nothing. I mean, if you have a part of your country that's called the "rust belt" then don't be surprised when it doesn't vote according to logic.Last edited by anton pulisov; 24-03-2018, 00:54.Comment
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No, or at least I assume that's true. I was think more of of WOM's Dad. Most of my schoolmates took apprenticeships in similar trades (in fact one of my best and oldest friends is still a tool and dye cutter.) Certainly he, and I'm guessing others, had pride in their work, and a deep sense of craftmanship.Originally posted by ursus arctos View PostComment
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On The Buses had no black characters at a time when London Transport was dependent on labour it had recruited from the Caribbean. It was nostalgia for the 1930s probably but with early 70s tits and bums thrown in.
Now that Republicans have voted for spunking all this debt spiralling cash, fiscal conservatism must be dead as a policy that will ever be implemented even though the GOP will pretend to believe in it.Comment
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"I don't want nobody else... I love you."Comment
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I don’t want nobody else
She’s lying.
If I type it out it might go away. My fucking weekend of no alarms and all. Had some top class sleeping pencilled in.Comment
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Yeah, I could well believe that It does illustrate though a number of economic issues, which are important to assess properly and put in the modern context. Really the quickest way to ensure steadily rising wages is to generate a shortage of workers. However that's not an easy thing to do. There are usually a lot of people around. And one major difference between now and then is that half the workforce is female, and on average they are better qualified. Also people are a lot more able to move around, which means that there's a greater degree of commuting and movement. One major way to push up wages in London, and house prices would be to end commuting, and force everyone who wanted to work in london to live there. But the other aspect is that over time migrants have been allowed into the workforce.Originally posted by Satchmo Distel View Post
This is the context in which you can understand people's economic rationales for wanting to limit migration. In their limited understanding of how things work, they know that this worked in the past. They have no idea why they had to stop doing this and they have no idea that trying to go back is going to break literally everything, and still fail in any of their aims.
Back in 1971, non Uk born people only made up 4% of the population. now they make up 12% of a considerably bigger population. This in particular is one of the low points of post war trade union history and it boils down to one of the really tricky issues for Trade Unions, and for their associated political parties. Trade unions aren't interested in the interests of all workers, any more than they apply to their own members in a general sense, and when push comes to shove they will represent the interests of their members over the common good. The problem of Insider power, makes it extremely difficult for outsiders to enter, and leads to an awful lot of other problems further down the line. (Paris would be a good example) But it also represents a problem for society as a whole. If workers are artificially able to restrict labour, the subsequent pay rises are fed into the consumers prices, and society as a whole has to pay a higher price for this particular good, not because it got any better, not because it got any scarcer, but because people were able to generate a shortage of labour, in an economy where there was no shortage of people, and which was choosing not to admit very many people. This was one major root of inflation in the seventies, which meant that everyone got lots of big pay rises, which unless you were fortunate to work for people who could afford to keep paying, or unless you were politically powerful enough to force these rises, you fell further and further behind. Put simply inflation makes people without political power who were just about managing poor, It makes poor people poorer, and kills poor pensioners.
But this alone goes nowhere near explaining the inflation of the 1970's. This along with various other little snags including an approach to competition law that was very insider friendly, and allowed professionals and businessmen to carve out their own little piece. (Think of how awkward it is to go through the legal process of buying a house. In Denmark you can do it yourself online.) and then that brings us onto the issue of Tariffs. The issue with tariffs, is that when you raise a tariff against a certain good, you are making the price of that good expensive for the whole of society, in order to benefit a particular industry, and a particular set of people. The thing is that it would cost an awful lot less money to just give those people the money directly. But that's much less effective than the simple non tariff barriers that companies were able to erect.
The there are the side effects of success. If you introduce Comprehensive education, and open up university to more than a small number of people, having a university degree is going to lose a lot of its magic lustre. When My mam was in University in galway at the start of the sixties, there were 999 students n the whole college. Now there are 23,000, (19k under 4k post) and another 10K in GMIT the more vocational 3rd level institution. One of the reasons that Jourmalism jobs pay considerably less than they did in the past relatively speaking is that there are universities in the UK churning out thousands of Journalism students, so other barriers to entry have to be erected, like internships etc, and often the journalism jobs go to the same people they would have gone to in the good old days. (A lot of football journalists went to Oxbridge. even some of the ones that you wouldn't expect)
But this applies in Law, and in other traditional university based professional occupations, while the large number of people with third level education means that people can compete for jobs across a wider range of businesses at a much higher level than before, when in the past you had to become highly specialized through an apprenticeship, and when the industry changed, you were fucked, or if you wanted to change jobs, things could get tricky.
The thing about this is that this has fundamentally changed the way that people earn money. To compensate for all of these changes and in order to stave off revolution, taxation has changed substantially, and the scope of welfare states has radically expanded. For instance Ireland before you include taxes and welfare, Ireland has a level of inequality comparable to South Africa (after taxes and income) but once the Government steps in, our Gini Coefficient falls into the netherlands/canada/estonia territory. Three quarters of what the Irish govt spends is in the form of wealth transfers. Either in terms of wages, pensions, social welfare payments of various sorts, and we have an extraordinarily progressive taxation system, where nearly half the households in the country pay no income tax, and the top 20% pay 70% of the tax. It's also worth noting that Ireland is a considerably more equal country after the celtic tiger than it was before, despite making essentially no deliberate efforts to achieve this aim.
The thing is though that we're a grasping people, and given the choice between a tax cut, or an income increase, and providing a service that could reduce the cost of living, we will always take the first two, and that's why we can't have nice things. Like Free childcare, or council housing. We're A mixture of Psychotic, and utterly sociopathic about housing, and everyone wants to put their thumb on that scale, and we will happily let people sleep in the street, and children grow up in hostels and B&B's at substantial expense rather than do the fucking obvious thing and have the state build a couple of hundred thousand flats in dublin, because we have the lowest proportion of apartments of any city in the fucking developed world, and the highest proportion of 3-5 bedroom houses. But doing that would involve raising taxes, which would then be spent on other people, would cut the arse out of our insane rental sector, which is benefiting an awful lot of people, while taking an axe to the current insane houseprices, which are the result of this shortage. There are also a wide variety of steps that the govt could take to take a lot of the thumbs off the various scales at every stage of the property market.
The thing about ireland is that the political party that did that, would receive literally no thanks from the people who benefited, and would be gunned down in the street by someone with a two rental properties in rathmines, or an angry solicitor who had to lease a smaller car because conveyancing work dried up.Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 24-03-2018, 11:16.Comment
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Anyway, to return to the initial point, In order to resolve the issues with inflation, govts of all hues set about resolving it, in different ways. In the UK the government waged unrelenting war on their trade union movement and razed half the country, while more sensible northern european countries set about untangling the various kinks and knots in their economies and essentially set about yanking all sorts of thumbs off the scale. With the net result that the most efficient economy in europe is the Danish economy, where the focus is on setting everything up in a way that maximises the size of your economy, and then you apply your balanced, comprehensive, and relatively high tax take, and create the most equal society in the world, with the highest standard of living.
America did none of these things. America could have completely overhauled its industrial base, and forced companies to invest the large amounts of capital needed, and the restructurings necessary to produce the ultra productive, and highly reliable, and well priced sort of industry that you find in Japan, or Germany, while providing adequate support to the people displaced by the wave of upgrades. Instead they allowed LBO pirates to fuck up one large chunk of their industrial base in an orgy of sociopathic and massively destructive greed, and a lot of the rest failed to invest, were unable to make the transformation necessary, and as a result were wiped out completely with the loss of all jobs, devastating regions. Also in their war against unions they allowed companies who actually did want to go through a wave of investment were able to make this investment overseas, and a wide variety of tax schemes were created to make this wildly attractive. (This is the real issue, tax is where the american govt can exert influence on business. The American govt can if the occasion arises make russia's tax police look like they're trying too hard)
It really didn't help that by the time this change was happening, one of the political parties in the US had completely fallen off the rational "Lets try and maximise the size of our economy" wagon, and completely went over to destroying govt, and fundamentally attacking the tax and welfare redistribution of money, just as it was needed to compensate for the changes in the economy. Indeed they've spent much of the last 40 years systematically transferring wealth from the many to the few, and the enormous failure of the Democratic party, and a sign that it is fundamentally far more right wing that most european right wing parties, is that at no point did they challenge this model, and consequently the only people who get to benefit really from the transfer of wealth in a meaningful way are baby boomers, who yet again seem to have sorted things out relatively nicely for themselves.
The thing is that what people in the UK think is the Economic consensus, is just the economic consensus that you get to hear articulated is the UK and US economic consensus, which is essentially pushed by sociopaths who get an erection when they think about people suffering. The Economic consensus in the European union involves going a lot further on the whole tax and redistribution front, to varying degrees. The Dutch take a 10% bigger share of the economy in taxation to pay for higher levels of redistribution (46% to 42%) This in turn allows them to have a much more productive and efficient economy, which means that dutch govt spending per head is 30% higher than in the UK, and their Gini Coefficient is .30 as opposed to the uk's .36, which is a very meaningful difference. The US has a gini coefficient of .39 which tbh seems a little low, given how enthusiastically the republicans have been working to push it up, with the able assistance of their Democratic brethern.
and to return to the issue of trade unions, lest the start of the post have seemed a little negative. It's important not to look at trade unions simply within the UK and US contexts. Those two countries launched an all out war to destroy the bargaining power of labour, to suck every last penny out of the corpse of industry, and they launched an all out war on not only existing terms and conditions for people already in employment, but also obliterated any minimum protections for workers, which aside from adopting the EU working time directive, the New Labour govt did fuck all to redress.
You need a vibrant and strong trade union movement that works in partnership with employers to maximize the benefits for their employees, and to continuously improve productivity in a planned way. It's very difficult to keep making the necessary changes as they arise, without strong unions, who at the back of their mind are always aware that they are competing against the rest of the world, and that their jobs can move if things don't keep going well. This isn't about eating shit when it comes to pay, Pay rises in a properly organized economy are dependent on rises in productivity which is a function of technology, human capital, appropriate work practices. Wages and conditions in even non-unionized modern high productivity factories are far beyond the dreams of workers in the 1970s. The problem for the UK is that you destroyed this bit of your economy.
The UK would be a very different place to day if labour didn't spend their time in power slowly increasing the govt's spending share of gdp from an obscenely low 36% to 42%, on the back of an asset price bubble in the south, and debt fueled consumer spending. It's not just that they were really shit at being a left wing party, but they were really shit at being a right wing party too. That Labour failed to turn a commons majority that meant you could rule like a god for 10 years into meaningful progress on every front is unforgivable, And now that the party is in the hands of people further to the left, they all seem to suffer from being morons who don't understand anything about anything, and that's fucking heartbreaking. Now you have zero hours contracts and Mike Fucking Ashley, who should just fuck off back to the 1830's when people like him were publicly admired for their cuntishness to others.
The thing is that the world is vastly richer than it was before and this is generally increasing quite sharply. Economies have exploded and this has opened up the vistas of opportunity for parties of the left, or even parties of the right that want to actually maximize wealth. The fundamentals of economic trade and development have changed quite radically, and what we are seeing in America and the UK are the effects of going through this economic transformation, but literally only doing the bits that benefit the rich, and there is literally no sense anywhere that the democrats stand for anything other than being the party of having at least a semi functional skeleton of a govt, with token redistribution, which puts them in that niche, a bit to the left of the republicans.
Basically the policy prescription for fixing america is a) the economy is broadly fine, stop distorting it, as that reduces overall growth and depresses economic growth and equality. b) stop trying to put a saddle on the workers. You might think that you're saving money but you're just killing your market. c) Tax fucking rich people, and share it between people so america doesn't completely turn into a fascist dystopian shithole d) use govt spending to make a meaningful difference to peoples lives. universal healthcare would be a really good start.
There is of course about as much chance of Donald Trump doing this as the democrats, and I suspect that that is where some people fell for his utter bullshit. indeed virtually every single one of his voters has literally no idea how the economy is actually supposed to work. which makes them easy prey for those who want to loot it, while framing it as stopping people from taking what is yours and giving it to life's losers. What a great many wanted to hear were utter lies about bringing back the fifties of jobs for white men, when women knew their place, and if they didn't you could give them a right beating and raping, and shoot any uppity person who you think is looking at you funny. While allowing you to keep what's yours.
Fucking morons.Last edited by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!; 24-03-2018, 11:03.Comment
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The earworm was deliberate.Comment
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I'd agree with that. The tool and die trade attracted a certain sort, including many Germans for whom precision and measuring things in 'thou' [thousandths of an inch, I grew up learning] was standard in terms of accuracy. I also learned you don't borrow another man's tools, you never fiddle with a machine in case it's already been adjusted for making a cut the next morning, etc.Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
This is one of those trades like cabinet making or carpentry or plumbing, where the problem-solving engaged your brain and the physicality engaged your hands and made the whole thing really satisfying. He did it from 16 to 60 and was probably never bored for a day.
I saw the same thing once when I went to Home Depot to get a piece of plywood cut. I needed multiple cuts, but they only give you two cuts for free. I said to the old German guy, 'don't worry...just charge me for the cuts' and he was like "No, no....there's probably a way we can do this. Now if we double up the wood on the second cut, and then turn the saw...." all to save me $1.50 or something. It was the challenge and the problem, and it thrilled him.
I love that shit.Comment
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