The Backlash against Bill Gates' Call for a Robot Tax

You know you can still enroll in the military to get free college just like baby boomers. Worked just fine for my dad, my brother, and my sister.
Well my method was to go to school for a year, then work for a year off and on, taking general classes at community college since that was massively cheaper, then transferring them over to a university later to finish off my degree. Point is, I think you can understand the more barriers there are to education, the longer the next stage of human evolution as you call it is going to take.

Not at all, because you can't teach an old dog new tricks. By the time they are rich, they have generally crystallized their world view, attitude, and personality, and aren't going to suddenly change into different people when they hit it big. They are going to keep acting how they have always acted.

The problem is, if you have children that see mommy and daddy just sitting on their asses watching TV and taking that government check, how do you keep them from mimicking what they see around them and acting the same? If that's the natural state of man, and there's no carrot to drive people, its likely to be common, and its also likely that these people are going to have far more children than the successful career oriented driven people.

In other words, how do you prevent Idiocracy or Wall-E? I don't have an answer either.
There are a lot of ways to address this. Don't want to work and be a slackass? No problem, you get to live in projects-grade housing and eat the gourmet equivalent of dog food. Enjoy life! Oh, you would like to live in a HOUSE? Yeah, you'll have to work for that. Or hey, if daddy made millions as a businessman, well that was HIM. You could put caps on how much wealth could be transferred to his descendants to prevent modern-day aristocracies.

People can and will strive to better their condition, that's as natural as eating. Like you said though, there has to be a carrot to think that they CAN in the first place as opposed to being simply fucked. I'm saying homelessness and hunger are bad "sticks" for trying to advance humanity if it can at all be avoided. What's the point of civilization if you're not any further from death in society than you would be in the jungle?
 
If a persons job was lost to automation and the business is still taxed as if it were a working person. There would be less incentive to automate as quickly.
Same issue that moved manual labor into asia occurs: business owners simply find it cheaper to out-source production, manual or robotized into a different country. What now? Hell, production being robotized it may even be profitable to move it into some failed state or barge and pay some armed force to guard it. What then?
 
You know you can still enroll in the military to get free college just like baby boomers. Worked just fine for my dad, my brother, and my sister.
Not at all, because you can't teach an old dog new tricks. By the time they are rich, they have generally crystallized their world view, attitude, and personality, and aren't going to suddenly change into different people when they hit it big. They are going to keep acting how they have always acted.
The problem is, if you have children that see mommy and daddy just sitting on their asses watching TV and taking that government check, how do you keep them from mimicking what they see around them and acting the same? If that's the natural state of man, and there's no carrot to drive people, its likely to be common, and its also likely that these people are going to have far more children than the successful career oriented driven people.
In other words, how do you prevent Idiocracy or Wall-E? I don't have an answer either.
Stop posting stupid shit that only applies to today where there are still sufficient jobs to go around. Sometime in the future, and that is closer than you think, there will not be enough jobs to go around. That is what everyone excpet you is talking about.

We all get it. Go to school. Graduate but don't end up with an art major and owe tens of thousands in student loans. Get a job. Stay motivated. Always make yourself useful. This is all NOW. That won't be the case anymore in the future.
Unless you're not going to live another 10yr or so you will get to see the start of it. Just eliminating a big portion of the truckers' jobs will have a significant economic effect and you might see that happen within the next 5yr.
Good point. Embarrassingly I had to Google. So we have 3.5 million truckers currently and supposedly we'll eliminate half of that or 1.7 million in the next 10 years. That will have an effect.
 
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Stop posting stupid shit that only applies to today where there are still sufficient jobs to go around. Sometime in the future, and that is closer than you think, there will not be enough jobs to go around. That is what everyone excpet you is talking about.

We all get it. Go to school. Graduate. Get a job. Stay motivated. Always make yourself useful. This is all NOW. That won't be the case anymore in the future.
Just curious, how old are you?
Tetris42 said:
Point is, I think you can understand the more barriers there are to education, the longer the next stage of human evolution as you call it is going to take.
No, I don't understand. You said that baby boomers got free college, no strings attached, and so expect the same for millennials. What do you base that on?

The only free college boomers got was when they enrolled in the military. That hasn't changed. What did you mean before when you said that baby boomers got free college?
 
Sometime in the future, and that is closer than you think, there will not be enough jobs to go around.
That's really the core of the whole discussion. If there are only X jobs available, and there are X + 50,000,000 people who need jobs, what then?
 
That's really the core of the whole discussion. If there are only X jobs available, and there are X + 50,000,000 people who need jobs, what then?
You have 50,000,000 to get rid of somehow. Here's your profit driven reason for expansion into solar system and beyond: feeding a ton of mouths that have nothing to do but make trouble is much more expensive than just deporting them onto a different planet. Killing them off may work too, but i try to be optimistic, not to mention that war that would erupt from that would be nothing but loss for everyone involved.
 
No, I don't understand. You said that baby boomers got free college, no strings attached, and so expect the same for millennials. What do you base that on?

The only free college boomers got was when they enrolled in the military. That hasn't changed. What did you mean before when you said that baby boomers got free college?
I said they had free TUITION. Not all of college was free, but that's the lion's share of it, the part that drives up student debt to unseen levels. And check your history, college tuition WAS FREE at many, many universities in the USA. It wasn't a national thing, it was done at the state level. That went away around the 70s.

EDIT:
Here, you wanted a source:

http://www.politifact.com/florida/s...llege-once-free-united-states-and-it-oversea/

I didn't have one handy, since this is common knowledge to me, kind of like saying industry increased after WWII or we had a dot com boom in the late 90s, it's just general history.
 
You have 50,000,000 to get rid of somehow. Here's your profit driven reason for expansion into solar system and beyond: feeding a ton of mouths that have nothing to do but make trouble is much more expensive than just deporting them onto a different planet. Killing them off may work too, but i try to be optimistic, not to mention that war that would erupt from that would be nothing but loss for everyone involved.

Sounds like the beginnings of the hunger games!
 
That's really the core of the whole discussion. If there are only X jobs available, and there are X + 50,000,000 people who need jobs, what then?
This already happened ages ago.

The term luddite came from the actual Luddites of the 1800s that went around destroying machinery, because with it they said there wouldn't be enough jobs to go around. And that's true, mechanization means that for the most part, there are only a tiny fraction of those original manual labor field jobs available, while the population has exploded exponentially.

So why is the unemployment rate only 5-10%? Because there are always jobs to do; new jobs that previously weren't envisioned and this is not going to change.

If not a single person is needed for factory type work, that doesn't mean that it doesn't free up that person to more creative or mind driven endeavors... the problem is, you have to have the drive to educate yourself so that you can contribute in a meaningful way. But studying sucks. Why should I not go drink beer at a party and hang out at the pool with my friends and study physics?

Like you say, if being poor sucks enough, then that can be a "stick" motivator at least, but many are arguing that not having a job should be comfortable. Comfortable people are often unmotivated people. So if they are unmotivated they may never push themselves to learn to be able to contribute to society in a helpful way, and they may then have six or seven kids who will grow up in that environment and learn from mommy (if daddy is even around), and continue that cycle, and have six or seven kids of their own.

And we've seen in heavily socialist societies what happens when contribution is divorced from compensation. Why should you do more than the bare minimum when your neighbor to the left and right of you will get the exact same lifestyle as you from doing the bare minimum. This is a basic human nature belief in "fairness", and so you end up with everyone doing the bare minimum and really stagnating, Venezuela style.

That's the trap.
 
You have 50,000,000 to get rid of somehow. Here's your profit driven reason for expansion into solar system and beyond: feeding a ton of mouths that have nothing to do but make trouble is much more expensive than just deporting them onto a different planet. Killing them off may work too, but i try to be optimistic, not to mention that war that would erupt from that would be nothing but loss for everyone involved.
That's not a profit-driven solution though. Say I'm a tech entrepreneur. What's your pitch on me funding sending 50 million people into space? How do I make money from that?

This already happened ages ago.

The term luddite came from the actual Luddites of the 1800s that went around destroying machinery, because with it they said there wouldn't be enough jobs to go around. And that's true, mechanization means that for the most part, there are only a tiny fraction of those original manual labor field jobs available, while the population has exploded exponentially.

So why is the unemployment rate only 5-10%? Because there are always jobs to do; new jobs that previously weren't envisioned and this is not going to change.
See this is exactly what I was talking about earlier. I'm not seeing these new job opportunities from robots aside from the minute number from designing, building and maintaining them. With the industrial revolution and the advent of computers and the internet, we didn't envision everything, but it was obvious there were jobs on the horizon. So you lose your job as a barrel-maker, but get a job at the gear-making factory. You lose your job as a filing clerk, but get a job as a database administrator, or designing websites, the new jobs were sprouting up as the old ones were disappearing. So that's my question, what are all these new jobs springing up to replace our current ones?

If not a single person is needed for factory type work, that doesn't mean that it doesn't free up that person to more creative or mind driven endeavors... the problem is, you have to have the drive to educate yourself so that you can contribute in a meaningful way. But studying sucks. Why should I not go drink beer at a party and hang out at the pool with my friends and study physics?
I get what you're saying, but now imagine this: In the future you have an unemployment rate at 40% and the fields there are openings in have 8 years education minimum that you don't have yet and there is NOTHING in the interim. If it was as simple as putting your back into it, this wouldn't be a crisis looming on the horizon.

Like you say, if being poor sucks enough, then that can be a "stick" motivator at least, but many are arguing that not having a job should be comfortable. Comfortable people are often unmotivated people. So if they are unmotivated they may never push themselves to learn to be able to contribute to society in a helpful way, and they may then have six or seven kids who will grow up in that environment and learn from mommy (if daddy is even around), and continue that cycle, and have six or seven kids of their own.
I think we're in more agreement on this than not, it could just be how we're defining it. To me, as long as a society isn't in a crisis state, people should have a roof over their head and food in their stomach. That doesn't mean NICE conditions, but there is a WORLD of difference between living in a shitty place, eating shitty food v. being perpetually only 2 weeks away from being out on the street. The stress from that latter situation will put a person in an early grave. I feel like we have to strive towards making sure everybody can get the bare minimum of what they need, most of all people who are already working or looking for it. I see that as vitally crucial towards holding a society together. Hell, I would be fine with no financial compensation whatsoever. So you're entitled to low-grade food and shelter, but MONEY? Nope, that's on you. And as for the next generation of people, I'd even support sterilization past fathering X number of kids, though I realize that's a radical view. On the flipside though, there have to be opportunities for kids to try and make it also, otherwise you'll never break the cycle.
 
Politfact? Really? :rolleyes: You have any non-fake news sources?

The only university they list as "free tuition" was Rice University, but it started charging tuition in 1965, meaning baby boomers would not have been old enough to remember that, nor was it the norm.

And cmon, they post nonsense like this:
In Sanders’ home state at the University of Vermont, a book about the school’s history indicates that tuition was charged in the 19th century. Senior class tuition was $8.34 in 1827.
1827... really? 1827...

And yet won't call out Bernie for being a liar. Baby Boomers had to pay for college, and while free college like scholarships were available, that is also an option today. While I agree that there is no reason for tuition to be as expensive as it is today, most of the millennials parents paid to go to university and baby boomers are their grandparents.

They like Bernie because he promises no-strings free shit, and there's really no reason to go to such elaborate mental gymnastics to morally justify it.
 
Well when no one has the jobs left to earn income, they wont be able to buy the goods and services the robots and machines are making. This is why you need to push the money to the people to drive demand rather than just give to the the people that produce and hope people can buy it.

This is why when you have a population of 350 million and only 10 million people jobs left you'll have to issue out a basic living wage to everyone.
 
Politfact? Really? :rolleyes: You have any non-fake news sources?

The only university they list as "free tuition" was Rice University, but it started charging tuition in 1965, meaning baby boomers would not have been old enough to remember that, nor was it the norm.

And cmon, they post nonsense like this:

1827... really? 1827...

And yet won't call out Bernie for being a liar. Baby Boomers had to pay for college, and while free college like scholarships were available, that is also an option today. While I agree that there is no reason for tuition to be as expensive as it is today, most of the millennials parents paid to go to university and baby boomers are their grandparents.

They like Bernie because he promises no-strings free shit, and there's really no reason to go to such elaborate mental gymnastics to morally justify it.
FFS, I just grabbed a quick link on this, I just took a guess they would be impartial. This is basic history. Here's time magazine:

http://time.com/4276222/free-college/

It says it clear as day Florida had free tuition for many decades. California and New York had universities that were free, I know Louisiana State University had free tuition, I had family who went there with that. You say it's wrong, prove it. Prove my family didn't go to college tuition free without being in the military. Like I said, this was done on a state-by-state basis, not nationally. Not EVERY university had free tuition, but a whole shitload did until the 70s.

EDIT:
Here, I realized this can be a biased source, but it states it outright:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/harlan-green/what-happened-to-tuition_b_10240514.html

"Until the Vietnam War, most public colleges and universities had it"

So there you go. Prove them wrong. They're saying MOST colleges and universities had free tuition until the Vietnam War. I'm happy to admit when I'm wrong, but I like evidence. You can claim something is fake all you want, but you need proof to back up your claim.
 
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That's not a profit-driven solution though. Say I'm a tech entrepreneur. What's your pitch on me funding sending 50 million people into space? How do I make money from that?
In this case you either lose money sending them far off or lose money from them destroying your business one way or another. Pick your poison, i know. Granted, sending them into walled off ghetto is positively cheaper :(
This is why when you have a population of 350 million and only 10 million people jobs left you'll have to issue out a basic living wage to everyone.
Now run the numbers, i dare you.
 
This is an absolute must-do, shouldn't even be up for debate. if you want to replace a human with a robot and autonomous vehicles, they should be taxes just like the human...

But then they'll just move all the robot jobs out of the country, to somewhere that doesn't tax the robots
 
Good luck with that.
Things have gotten crazy cheap though.

I see even poor people walking around with smartphones, when back in the day to have a single computer in your house meant you were wealthy.

Heck, people used to literally die just trying to acquire basic spices like pepper, which are included for free in almost every plasticware set at to-go cheap fast food restaurants.

Even salt and sugar were once so expensive, that early Roman soldiers were paid in salt. The term "salary" comes from the word "salarium" which was salt. Slaves lives were traded in bags of salt, and that's why saying that someone was "not worth his salt", it means he wasn't worth what he was paid for. Today, salt is so inexpensive that its included in everything and we overconsume.

Same with sugar, that was once back breaking labor to acquire.

So things have certainly become cheaper with advancement.
 
Like you say, if being poor sucks enough, then that can be a "stick" motivator at least, but many are arguing that not having a job should be comfortable. Comfortable people are often unmotivated people. So if they are unmotivated they may never push themselves to learn to be able to contribute to society in a helpful way, and they may then have six or seven kids who will grow up in that environment and learn from mommy (if daddy is even around), and continue that cycle, and have six or seven kids of their own.

And we've seen in heavily socialist societies what happens when contribution is divorced from compensation. Why should you do more than the bare minimum when your neighbor to the left and right of you will get the exact same lifestyle as you from doing the bare minimum. This is a basic human nature belief in "fairness", and so you end up with everyone doing the bare minimum and really stagnating, Venezuela style.

That's the trap.
As I mentioned with universal basic income, you make it the bare minimum (or slightly less) to survive out in the cheap rural areas or low income housing. Being forced to live in an unfavorable location and living on the bare minimum is going to suck, and it will motivate people to try to find work or get an education.

I have actually volunteered at food banks while researching food insecurity, tutored children at low-income housing while researching homelessness, and worked with other nonprofits. I can tell you that these people are not lazy! These individuals are the same as you and I and quite capable. Just some of them didn't grow up with more than a car to sleep in while going to school or are going through generations of extreme poverty. This happens more than you think. Last year a mother handed her children over to CPS for foster care because the temperature dropped to above freezing overnight, and her 9 year old's breathing had worsened due to asthma. She was afraid that her child would get pneumonia, so she chose to let her children go in the hopes that he would grow up to be a healthy boy. The mother couldn't work because her other child was a 4 year old with autism, and the father was only making $12.25/hour.

Two weeks ago, one of the homeless children showed me a song that he created at school. Believe me, these individuals aspire to do more when they are given an opportunity to do so.
 
As I mentioned with universal basic income, you make it the bare minimum (or slightly less) to survive out in the cheap rural areas or low income housing. Being forced to live in an unfavorable location and living on the bare minimum is going to suck, and it will motivate people to try to find work or get an education.
I agree the basic universal income is a solution, which was discussed in a previous thread.

I don't think they will live in rural areas though, as most tend to concentrate in inner cities, closest to where the government programs and government jobs are.
I can tell you that these people are not lazy! These individuals are the same as you and I and quite capable.
I'm 37 years old, and my life experience says the opposite, that they are generally lazy (lately there's a very young and fit guy at the corner by my office everyday getting handouts and you know he gets every government handout coming to him as well, while you have illegal aliens that don't even speak english and don't have a highschool education that somehow find jobs that HE is too good for) and make very poor life decisions.

In the case of the homeless, often drug and alcohol abuse are major contributing factors and they don't understand the concept of delayed gratification, and so fall into credit traps where they keep buying and buying on credit and even paycheck loans and their credit goes to crap when they don't pay it. Heck, an ex-coworker of mine kept bitching and moaning about how much debt he was in and his horrible credit score, and then he would constantly go out to eat which is expensive and make retarded purchases like a gigantic top of the line 4K TV and a bunch of hand made star wars light sabers.

Regarding children, the government already pays out a fortune to children, there are free school lunches, the poor have the highest rates of obesity in the nation showing that they are hardly wanting for food, and public education is free. The problem is typically that these children grow up watching how their parents live, and when their parents are unmotivated losers that make irrational short-term thinking decisions about everything, they do the same.

Unsuccessful people and successful people generally do not think the same.
 
When AI replaces economist, when 3D printers replace construction workers, when self driving cars replace taxi drivers and commercial drivers, when AI replaces pilots, when postal workers are replaced by drones, when cashiers are replaced with self-checkouts, when doctors and nurses are replaced by error proof robotic surgeons and diagnostic robots, when automated farms replace farmers, when warehouses and factories are human free, and so on... The world is going to need to make a very important decision on what to do with the hundreds of millions, if not billions, that'll be unemployed across the world.

Capitalism only works when consumers (the real and ONLY job creators) spend money, and government only works when it can collect taxes from businesses profit, people's income, and spending. If hundreds of millions-billions of people are unemployed, they won't be spending money, which means businesses will go under even with automation, and government won't be able to provide earned benefits, along with funding other government services, with a severely weakened tax base. There's only 3 possible choices for the world to make.

The first, is to say "tough luck" to these people, tell them they should've picked a better profession or should've been born into a wealthy family, cut their benefits, and wait for the eventual violent civil unrest to hit the world as people are fed up and angry over not being able to provide for themselves or their families while a select few live comfortably thanks to others hard work. (Global French Revolution with an unknown outcome, and possibility of Hitler like people raising to power around the world blaming foreigners/outsiders for their nations problems)

The second, is to implement a basic universal income that gives every human a set living wage per month, funded by corporate taxes, and a tax on automation. This would provide money for rent, food, all utilities, and some extra for leisure activities/personal spending. This all ontop of Universal Healthcare, Universal Education, etc. (Basically continue todays system, but largely funds someones paycheck and well being by taxes)

The third, which would probably be the hardest to implement today, is to ditch capitalism, have the 1% lose their extra stolen privileges and move to a money free system, where our machines and technology does most of the manual work and provides for every human. (This may need option 1 to happen first in order to "burn down" the old)
Who builds, programs, sells, ships, installs, operates, repairs, supports, powers and mines the materials for all these machines?

Star Trek utopia is a long way off.
 
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Millenials are anything but entitled and are generally poorer and have less opportunities for higher paying work than their fathers or grandfathers did.
The opportunities are there, they're just not as easy as those millenials think they should be. There's this myth that my generation (boomers) could just walk into a company and get a job. This may be due to all the old TV shows that show it happening. But it wasn't true. Sure, there were crappy jobs in fast food and such, but you didn't get automatically hired for those, either. Just walking into a company and being given a good job? Nope. We applied, and hoped. Most times, we didn't get what we wanted and had to try someplace else. The only time you were guaranteed a job was if you were the child of the company owner.
When I try to tell high school kids how to get ahead, they tell me it's too much work; it's too hard, that they shouldn't have to do all those things just to get a good job. Great expectations. Dreams of walking out of college and getting a corner office in a year (another myth perpetuated by things like 'Mad Men'). Reality sucks. These people are told that they can go to any college, be anything they want to be. When they find out that isn't true, they sulk. When they complain that college costs too much, I suggest they start out at a community college and transfer to a 4 year school later, they balk. Again, great expectations, and refusal to accept doing what has to be done to achieve the goal. I've seen several people who wanted to go to medical school, but already had huge debt from expensive private colleges instead of going to a state school. When I suggested joining the military to help the costs of med school, they, too, refused to consider it. It's this general assumption that they deserve more than they have, which tends to get in their way.

Detroit decayed as the auto industry left. It was that simple. It wasn't about race, it was about money. Rich people don't give a crap about poor people. Doesn't matter what color the poor people are. There are plenty of poor white people who are out of work in this country. Just look at many of the people who came to Trump's rallies. Large numbers of angry, unemployed (or feeling under employed) white people. The difference is, the black folks are used to being lied to by the upper class, and can recognize it better. Working class whites really believe their corporate owners when they get told things will get better, just 'wait a little longer'. And a little longer. And longer. They've been waiting what, 40 years? 45 years? When is it going to sink in that they're being lied to? I just don't know.

boomers as a whole started to retire or reach retirement age en masse a few years ago and so are either eligible or collecting on Social Security and/or Medicare. As they should of course, they paid into them, but those are actual entitlements and you do somehow seem to think they're bad, or immoral, or unethical


What goes unsaid is that there is a lot more to entitlements and outrageous gov't spending than social security and medicare. The quote is always, 'Entitlements LIKE social security and medicare'. No one ever mentions what the 'LIKE' refers to. Oh, such as government contracts (military as well as civilian essentially become an entitlement once the contract is in place), not to mention all the perks and then retirement benefits that the elected officials get, yup, all 'entitlements', but they'd never mention those, because THOSE will never be cut. Only the 'little people' will have their entitlements cut.

The whole point of technical advancement from societies' perspective is to eliminate work and make people's lives better.
Nope. That's not how the elite see it. To them, the whole point of technical advancement is to make their investments more profitable, and usually, that winds up by making most other people's lives, worse.
 
Sanders is the hand-me-out candidate, cmon.
Lets say he was, how does Sander's being the "hand me out" (he wasn't, he was pro redistributive taxation) candidate make millenials entitled NOW? They don't have any of the policies he wanted to implement so how are they so entitled exactly? Also everyone likes "free shit" and if use entitlements are you're means of judging then the Boomers are far more entitled than millenials.

but Detroit was not abandoned, its population was replaced.
Detroit's population has done nothing but decline for decades.

The new population had every opportunity to at the very least maintain the beautiful city that Detroit once was, but it was a dependent class that was content to live on welfare and with no pride and drive, and so the area fell to ruin and disrepair.
No one chooses to live on welfare dude. The pay is crap and so is the standard of living you get. You live on welfare when you have no other choice. If you have evidence otherwise you'll have to post it.

That is the attitude we need to prevent,
Why? Why is work or even pointless drudgery as make-work need to exist if machines can do all the work for us? You realize work has nothing to do with ethics or morality in such a reality right?

For society to advance, we need drive.
Pointless make-work and drudgery are the exact opposite of what you need to create drive.
 
You know you can still enroll in the military to get free college just like baby boomers. Worked just fine for my dad, my brother, and my sister.
Quite a lot of them didn't have to join the military post-WWII though. State college used to be either free or near free. Today it is the exact opposite. And you can't use bankruptcy to get out of the debt anymore either.

Not at all, because you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
WTF?! You truly believe that wealth prevents people from learning new skills?!

In other words, how do you prevent Idiocracy or Wall-E? I don't have an answer either.
Those are both movies dude. They're meant to be satire of sorts, not accurate depictions of a possible future.
 
That's what is interesting about the economic people claiming he'd hold back progress. That may very well be true, but not all progress is good progress. The faster we replace our job force, the faster we have to figure out our new economic structure.

Do we go full in on nobels (the rich machine owners) and peasants (everyone else) again? How will these companies make money if their consumer base is shrunk?

Got me thinking. the difference between the historical nobility and the nobility in this scenario is that historically, the nobility relied on peasants. The nobility in this scenario would have absolutely no use for the lower classes.

Scary
 
human labor is expensive.
If one robot could replace 5 people, goods better be 1/5 the price

Problem is, that's 5 people who can't afford whatever it is, because they aren't working at all anymore. That's why the old solutions do not apply any longer: we're not talking about higher employee efficiency, this is actually complete labor substitution.
 
Well, part of those handouts were things Baby Boomers GREW UP WITH like tuition-free college, but okay, millennials are all the entitled ones.
Not true. Baby boomers' college was never free. My dad worked his ass off in a restaurant job to help pay for his California education. The cost was less than now, but still not free. If you make college free, it becomes just another worthless certificate. Also, the cost of living makes up the majority of the cost of most college anyway, however it would add significantly to the expenditure of the state budget if you made tuition free.

Tell you what, you vote to stop funding K-12 and college education for illegal immigrants and I will vote to make college free. The real reason California is broke is because the cost of illegal immigration consumes probably 1/3 of the budget. The states have to raise revenues from somewhere.
 
Lets say he was, how does Sander's being the "hand me out" (he wasn't, he was pro redistributive taxation) candidate make millenials entitled NOW? They don't have any of the policies he wanted to implement so how are they so entitled exactly?
Huh? Entitlement is an attitude, they have an entitlement mentality, while living in their parent's basement.
Look at your graph. The population hit 1.4 million in 1925. The population was the same in 1975 in number, but not in demographics. They built things like the Michigan Theater and had a booming can-do attitude and Detroit was considered one of the most advanced and prosperous cities in the world for many decades. But then the great migration occurred, attracted from rural areas to the city centers by the promise of government handouts and government jobs being dolled out like candy, and as the areas started falling into disrepair and with increasing lawlessness, the native population moved elsewhere, to suburbs and other cities. The new population could have taken the reigns and built up their own successful businesses and industries and prospered, but that wasn't the prevailing culture.
No one chooses to live on welfare dude.
Of course they do, through their own life choices.



Like she says its "comfortable"... and that's all unmotivated people need to be on it generation to generation. Its "good enough" and easier than the alternative of working hard to better themselves and contribute to society.
 
Seems like a lot of folks here are happy for a future 7.99 billion to just starve in the streets. The fact that they will probably be in that 7.9 billion...

One way to fix it I guess.
 
WTF?! You truly believe that wealth prevents people from learning new skills?!
Uhhhhhh... what? Try reading again. Teaching an old dog new tricks is an adage about AGE.

When kids study hard in school, really apply themselves, push through their careers to advance, and achieve success, when they are old and successful, they aren't going to suddenly change personalities. They are going to remain the same type of people that made them successful in the first place, because that mentality and culture has already been crystallized in them.

This was in response to why successful people don't suddenly become sloths, and still continue to be driven people. Its because by the time they achieve success, they are already molded and solidified into the people they are, and continue with what they know and how they have always acted.

And what are you talking about new skills? Seriously, lol!
 
There are too many people in the world who have nothing of value to offer but their physical labor. They're not smart enough or witty enough or charming enough. Even the smart, witty, and charming ones will eventually be replaceable.

As I said before on this topic, the human population needs to be allowed to wind down its numbers, perhaps massively (I'm talking less than a million if that's what is required). Or allow segments of the population to exist in their own separate societies with their own more less-advanced economy and accept that their standard of living will be less, kind of like tribes in a jungle.

I am absolutely against paying millions and billions of people just for existing. There is nothing innately wonderful about having billions of humans milling uselessly about.
 
You realize work has nothing to do with ethics or morality in such a reality right?
Well traditionally, sloth is one of the 7 deadly sins. There's a world of difference between "work really hard and you may or may not have enough to have food AND a place to live" v. "work hard and you may better your situation" though.

Not true. Baby boomers' college was never free. My dad worked his ass off in a restaurant job to help pay for his California education. The cost was less than now, but still not free. If you make college free, it becomes just another worthless certificate. Also, the cost of living makes up the majority of the cost of most college anyway, however it would add significantly to the expenditure of the state budget if you made tuition free.
I can't speak personally for California, but a couple things:

1. I never said college was free. I said TUITION was free. You linked me to an article also saying tuition was free.

2. You're making a compelling case specifically for Berkeley. I particularly like this gem:
"California students with parent income under $60K don’t pay tuition/fees."
That is certainly NOT the case in many other states. If that was true, we would already have free college available for over half the country! Afterall, the average household only makes around 52k!

3. Finally, saying the bulk of the cost comes living expenses; I guess if you live high on the hog. In most places that's not the case:

Virginia tech tuition: more than room and board
Tennessee State Tuition: more than room and board
Michigan State tuition: more than room and board
New York State tuition: WAY more than room and board

In most cases, it's roughly the same cost as room and board, but there's some variance. I sure as hell found ways to do it cheap. And college is only a worthless certificate if you weren't taught anything and / or has no relevance to the workforce. Paying tuition fees isn't what gives a degree its value, it's being able to demonstrate the you have knowledge required of a specific field and have been tested for it. Otherwise, there's plenty of degree mills online that aren't free that have no real value.

This whole conversation is spiraling beyond what I was getting at anyway. The point is, in order to get to the "next stage of evolution" Ducman69 was talking about, you need a more educated populace, one way or another.
 
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.....Sure, I don't disagree that white-flight was part of what destroyed Detroit.....

White flight is bullshit. Blaming the city of Detroits downfall on people that weren't even there... That would be like blaming me for the overgrown yard of a house I sold to someone else 10 years ago. Yeah, why blame the people who moved in, lived there, and let it go to crap - it's much easier to blame whitey instead. If my house falls apart it's my fault for not maintaining it, it's not the fault of some guy that owned it before me.
 
A lot of people get confused and think this is the same thing as the industrial revolution or the rise of computers. It's not. Computers and the internet replaced jobs, but they also opened up a ton of new opportunities by creating new jobs that weren't possible before. The sole purpose of robots is to replace workers. The only opportunities created by this will be for programming and maintaining them, which by definition has to be a lower amount of jobs being displaced. I've yet to hear a single person tell me any of the new job opportunities that will come from replacing workers with robots. It really is going to cause problems on a scale we haven't seen before.

We have a winner!


No, it is exactly the same. Machinery displaced workers. Workers had to adapt. Computers did the same.

Just because with a CAD workstation, I can create in a week, what would have taken a year, 30 years ago. It doesn't mean that there are 50 unemployed destitute engineers somewhere.

As robots become prevalent, there will simply be shifts in business due to competition. As long as there are people to do work, there will be work.
 
No, it is exactly the same. Machinery displaced workers. Workers had to adapt. Computers did the same.

Just because with a CAD workstation, I can create in a week, what would have taken a year, 30 years ago. It doesn't mean that there are 50 unemployed destitute engineers somewhere.

As robots become prevalent, there will simply be shifts in business due to competition. As long as there are people to do work, there will be work.

Not at all, sorry you,are wayyyyy off... robots and autonomous vehicles are nothing like industrial revolution or computer age. None of those things eliminated jobs at the scale we are about to see. I strongly recommend you read up on the wave that's going to hit is in just 2-3 years, by 2025 we will have 100 million robots and autonomous vehicles and tens of millions of unemployed in US alone. Mass scale economic and social implosion is literally arou d the corner. If you don't recognize that, then you are clearly not paying attention to what is happening in these industries. You do realize in 2 years there will be driverless taxis and trucks wiping out millions of jobs by 2020?
 
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