Sorry that you don't feel like talking more. Thanks for being respectful throughout. If some of my animus towards richwind surfaced towards you let me assure you it was not intentional.

If I can say one thing - although I would never try to convince you to be less humble (which I find to be a prerequisite for - let's say - achieving true enlightenment) I would propose that you try to separate humility towards reality (ergo - being open to the facts, curious about exploring it, etc...) from humility towards others. Don't be subservient - our puny human life might be a grain of sand, but no one else is truly any bigger.

To the contrary, the note suggests 2 things: that Foxconn's wages are shite, and that the man had lost the will to go on living.

Those 17 suicides resulted in the square mile complex becoming a cacoon of suicide netting -- a picture that begs the caption "trouble in paradise".

Again, Foxconn is as good as it gets for workers in China, and is far above the appalling norm.


BTW, do you always answer yes/no questions with grandiose walls of text?

Many of the factories in China *are* sweatshops, with workers that sleep under their work tables, or bridges, etc., etc.

Actually, I presumed that you didn't see China as being ideal, so you have failed again to answer my question.

I made no reference to the Communist Party, but let's assume that I did: Foxconn exists because the CPC allows it to, and the fact that it is likely a grudging alliance is beside any point I am trying to make here.

But thank you for another grandiose wall of text.

When you have private control of national money supplies this is entirely moot, and this is well-understood by intelligent libertarians who long ago recognized and identified banking collusion for what it truly is, including it's relationship to the so-called "business cycle".

https://mises.org/library/economic-depressions-their-cause-and-cure-4/html/c/67


BTW, I quite enjoy walls of text that are informative. ;p

Only the fallacious ones. Like: Richlind, are you troll or a fool?

You do understand what I mean right? Loaded questions of the sort "Have you stopped beating your wife?" should be rejected as invalid. The premises behind your question were likewise invalid.

Despite which I have answered you already twice in separate posts:
1st - that sweatshop conditions =/= slavery
2nd - that China is fascist

You however, refuse to acknowledge the answers you already got, and are still trying to play gotchas.
It's also interesting that you step in replying to what I did not address at you. Why so desperate?

So, what are you trying to achieve here? I am curious.

How was I to know that you're more of an effete pseudo-intellectual than an abrasive charpit? ;p


You seem to be disputing that sweatshop conditions exist in China. I hope that is wrong but if it isn't, here's an article that should leave you better informed.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-11-26/secrets-lies-and-sweatshops

As for economics being a "hard" science, I'll leave you with a brilliant documentary that takes a good, hard look at the marriage of science and finance. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed2FWNWwE3I

We have an antiquated "labor based" economy where everyone needs to get work to survive. This is based on the idea that manpower need is plentiful and you need to motivated the manpower to fill the gaps.

More and more, knowledge based economy will make most non-knowledge based jobs (anything that doesn't require a degree) non necessary and even some less creative knowledge based jobs unnecessary.

Yet, people still need to eat, to be clothed and to put a roof over their heads.

I think there are two main solutions for this dilemma:

- Minimum Guaranteed Income: Enough to guaranteed all the minimum needs (lodging, clothes, food, electricity, decent Internet connection). Then, for any of the luxuries, motivate people to find work.

- Less Hours in a Working Week: If you lower the working week from 40 hours to 20 hours, you'll employ twice as many people. In any profession where there is a surplus of qualified labor, they should just do it. You don't need real artificial intelligence to replace most unskilled labor.

You just need a well designed experts system and very good pattern recognition.

Forget Skynet, SHODAN and all that crap. We can make software today that doesn't have the creativity and general purpose intelligence of a human being, but that can do their work for them.

Let's face it, a lot of unskilled labor is very menial and dumb. It requires some degree of sophistication to do as far as software systems go (anyone who can design software that can perform these tasks deserves some praise), but certainly nothing remotely resembling full blown consciousness.

Only in the private sector. In the public sector, you got a generation of highly unionized overpaid workers that will take a generation to replace with a more efficient system. A lot of their jobs is not about public service, it's about providing a cozy livelihood for them and in many case, they are supervised by a highly paid public 'servant' who is in the same boat so there is no real supervision to speak of.

I agree with the rest of what you said. Give me the reliability of a machine over an employee who would rather be elsewhere any day.

Don't get me wrong, interacting an employee who wants to be there can be highly satisfying, but more often than not, you feel like you're inconveniencing somebody who'd rather be elsewhere and I get it: A lot of those people are underpaid, overworked, work under an *sshole whose gameplan is to make them feel worthless so that they don't stand up for their rights and the job is quite uninteresting to begin with. Many of them are already getting treated like machines, might as well replace them with a machine.

That's just stupid, machinery is not manly, it's inhumanly strong.

I've been weightlifting for 2 years now. Within a couple more years, I'll have reached my limit (barring a highly skilled personal trainer and a specialized diet) and I'll still be dreaming about lifting anywhere near what your regular grocery store lift can lift.

That's my thought as well, except that many of us are petty children with a tendency to let their caveman ancestry shine through.

Ideas like this are very prevalent in our society:

"I work hard for my money and I subscribe to the myth of the self-made man, why should they get anything for free"

"I own company X and they are not getting squat. Either they do something useful for me or they starve for all I care"

Etc.

My brain is too dead to look through the pages and see if this was brought up already. If it was I apologize, but what I was seeing was the thread going into the direction of politics and such so I stopped reading.
Anyway.

Around Pittsburgh,PA,US in the ... I'm going to say nineties? I think I was a young teen, but not driving yet, so pre 97.
The Taco Bells around here had a touch screen kiosk for placing your orders. I can't remember if it was attached to a money taking machine, or if a person still did that, but I do remember that it didn't stick around very long.
I don't know why it went away, but I'm guessing it wasn't reacted to well by the customer. I know I prefer giving my order to a person usually.

So hearing that Wendy's is looking to try it again... I wonder if they feel the climate has changed enough to try again? (They have to know about the Taco Bell thing, then again.. they are a corporation.)

I dunno though. If I walk into my local Wendy's and they're piloting this program? I'm going to ask to talk to a manager, and explain to them that I'll be going to the Arby's, McDonalds, or Dairy Queen that are all within 1 minute of driving distance away. And I can see a lot of the older people I see eating there regularly doing the same thing.

I don't care how intuitive and easy to use the system ends up being, I don't like Wendy's enough to lose that bit of human interaction that I, for some reason, actually enjoy. (I also dislike dealing with stupid machines ... like the self checkouts at the grocery store that fuck up and need an actual person anyway as often as not. Don't know why my mother loves those things so much.)

No worries. We'll always have robot welfare.

I apologize for misreading you re hard vs human science. My bad. But I'm genuinely puzzled by your reaction to what you claim are "loaded" non sequiturs. The only difference I see between the sweatshop and the plantation is that the latter is more blatant and extreme, but is there really any question that both are/were dehumanizing? If not, what point is served by asserting that one is slavery but the other is not?

Life is dehumanizing. And it always kills us in the end. A lack of good choices does not make all evils equivalent. Choosing the lesser evil is almost defining of humanity.

So basically, it's a point of principle. I respect the choice of millions of sweatshop workers as coming from their human agency. Not sure you do. Seems to me you would take that choice from them, to benefit someone else's job security?

Anyway, thanks for changing your tone.

It is a good thing if we have space colonization and resource is not a problem.

Without that it will reach a point where many people will starve to death as they have little value to trade for food and stuff. The surviving population will be smarter people with robotic / automation / software skills or people with skills robots cannot replace. And only the better among them survive.

Then the world population will reach another equilibrium with existing resource. And mankind will evolve towards more brain power and less brawn. Who knows if out descendents will grow extra eyes / arms / fingers / tentacles / multiple brains for better multi tasking and information processing?

For the current population getting displaced by robots, it sucks.

not sure how it works in USA but here in australia they are much better than regular check out lanes.

simply because

There are dozen of them or more while normally there would be three or four lanes open. and there are two lanes open as well.

I don't wanna wait in a line when i have a bottle of milk to buy.

Resource management will still be a problem but yes, you're right, we really need to get our heads on that but I think quantum computing, A.I and nano technology needs to be better understood before that. I mean, the time it takes to travel in space at the moment is ridiculous.

I suspect these two things would lead to even more automation. Not sure, though - gotta mull it over a bit more. Given the HR overhead costs (benefits for each employee, and the general cost of HR for each employee), the second one would definitely be a hard sell down here. Combine the two and small business would dry up in a matter of a couple years.

In an economy where you are not forced to work week to week to pay for food and rent, small enterprises would thrive as more people would have the possibility of engaging in them.

Of course, extremely low wage crappy jobs would get into a state of crisis (nobody would want to do them unless conditions improved) though I personally don't consider this a bad thing. People doing the work nobody else wants to do would finally have some leverage and get the pay they deserve for doing thankless work. Also, on a 20 hours week, this kind of physically/emotionally draining soulless work would become more bearable and there would be fewer burnouts.

Also, if everyone's basics are covered in a guaranteed minimum wage, any additional income derived from employment becomes disposable income, which small businesses tend to thrive on even moreso than large corps.