Biden is trying hard to take himself out of the running by WISHIMAY

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Biden is trying hard to take himself out of the running

POSTED BY: WISHIMAY
UPDATED: Thursday, January 2, 2020 06:53
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Wednesday, January 1, 2020 4:42 PM

https://gizmodo.com/biden-to-coal-miners-learn-to-code-1840735758

Maybe one in 20 coal miners could read an average book in an average month. Many of them have never owned a computer (other than a cell phone), and I'm sure a few wouldn't know how to turn one on. And, yanno, there are just SOOOO many coding jobs up in them thar hills. It takes YEARS of expensive education to learn to code, even for someone so inclined.

Fucking politicians.

Fucking stupid planet.

They closed a few more coal mines here, and they are shutting down a couple more coal-based plants..

Don't see your idiot savior Trump doing anything for those people, either.

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Wednesday, January 1, 2020 5:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by WISHIMAY:
https://gizmodo.com/biden-to-coal-miners-learn-to-code-1840735758

Maybe one in 20 coal miners could read an average book in an average month. Many of them have never owned a computer (other than a cell phone), and I'm sure a few wouldn't know how to turn one on. And, yanno, there are just SOOOO many coding jobs up in them thar hills. It takes YEARS of expensive education to learn to code, even for someone so inclined.

Fucking politicians.

Fucking stupid planet.

They closed a few more coal mines here, and they are shutting down a couple more coal-based plants..

Don't see your idiot savior Trump doing anything for those people, either.

I knew one day you would say something that wasn't partisan.

I saw a video title on that yesterday, but I didn't have time to watch it with the DIY stuff I was learning. So he really told people to learn to code, huh? He's been reading too much Vox.

It's such a stupid phrase anyhow. There's a saturation point. Even if you aren't learning super technical coding stuff and you're just working in the tech sector, your job is very likely going to be replaced if it hasn't already.

It's not exactly cheap for anybody to go to college these days, and even less likely or desirable that an adult who has been doing labor all of their lives is going to do it. Biden must have forgot that Democrats haven't made college free yet.

That's the Dem front runner for you.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Wednesday, January 1, 2020 7:23 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

There are a lot of disappeared / disappearing / going to disappear job sectors.

I come from a former steel town with 3 mills, that employed literally one in every 10 total population in the county (counting women and children), to employing no one, in the span of 20 years. In the 50 years since the last mill shuttered (how time slips away!), neither the city nor the county have economically recovered, despite Herculean efforts to attract new businesses and diversify.

Nationally, autowork is essentially gone. So is forestry, fishing, and textile manufacturing, and of course, coal mining.

This gives you an idea of how drastically employment has changed over the decades (though note there is no 1910 job classification for IT, electronics, or other think-work modern industries, which I presume would be 'other').

There are only a few jobs I can think of that are disappearing due to resource depletion, like forestry and fishing. Every other job loss is a business decision.

And I'm not sure I have a lot of sympathy for people who are pro-capitalism when they complain about 'disappearing' jobs. The business of business is profit and, for publicly traded companies, stock prices; the business of business is NOT making things or providing employment. If you think in a capitalist economy businesses should be free to run themselves to maximize profit and, for publicly traded companies, stock prices (within legal business, wage, safety, product, and environmental standards), then they can close down whatever it is they're doing that isn't making them as much money as they want, and either walk away with the dough or invest in something entirely different ... like making lipstick, which has an incredibly high profit margin, instead of making steel. Or they can take those essentially zero-interest loans, buy back their stock, raise its value (due to demand they themselves generated), report record high stock prices to the boards, and give themselves big bonuses. It's their choice in this capitalist system.

BTW, I have a disagreement with candidate Andrew Yang, who believes that 'automation' will 'cause' jobs to disappear - like it's inevitable, like the law of gravity. Automation itself is a very human choice, not an inevitable process. Business heads choose automation to maximize profit. They could NOT choose it and retain jobs, if they so desired, at the cost of a lowered profit margin.

And I don't think people should be criticizing China for the way it runs its industries, which involves a lot of state investment and control over major areas. That they choose to follow a different model that (at this point) is more successful than ours is a tribute to their problem-solving skills.

Finally, FWIW I personally didn't vote against Hillary because of 'jobs', and I'm not sure anyone else here did. My problem with Hillary was that she's a warhawk. And so far, the US hasn't started any new wars. It looks like my choice went the right way, according to my priorities.

ETA: BTW I don't think this will affect Biden's standing. That he is where he is - after all the me-too's, the gaffes, the overall verbal stumbling and specific ineptitude in the debates, the questionable ethics, the bad governmental decisions ... people have already written off a lot worse and he's still number one.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/2020_democr
atic_presidential_nomination-6730.html

I can't figure out why he's there at number one - if people really feel a kinship with his overall stances, if they're just looking to be comforted by the same-old same-old, or if they're being completely tribal and Joe is #1 simply because he's #1, or what. But I can't see him being shaken off his perch because of (yet another) tone-deaf gaffe over (fill in the blank) miners .

But then, I could be wrong. We'll see.

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Wednesday, January 1, 2020 11:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

At this point, I don't even know what to think anymore. There's just too many variables.

I don't think Capitalism works anymore. But I can't tell you any alternative that does.

What we need is a system that is a meritocracy at the core. But unfortunately with race/sex quotas and all of the other Democrat "malarkey" going on right now we're moving far away from that.

Couple that with burning the candle at the other end with out of control Predatory Capitalism on the other side where acquisitions and mergers take place everyday, the rich get richer, and the CEOs of major corporations make hundreds to thousands of times as much money a year than their employees and the DOW JONES sucking the life out of the workforce we're basically fucked.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 2:42 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"I don't think Capitalism works anymore."

I don't think there was ever anything but the illusion that it did.

Capitalism has ALREADY been through the cycle we're entering now: think Dickens' Great Britain, with vast slums so dangerous and depraved people literally feared for their bodies and lives to enter the neighborhoods and walk their streets; and on the flip side, nobility's great Manor Houses worked by servants who were little better than slaves, with overseas income-generating colonial plantations of great wealth for a very few and great deprivation for nearly all. When you look at the broad historical scope of the great flowering of capitalism in the British Empire, from South Africa, Kenya, through the British West Indies, through China, through India, and on ... the naked failure of unrestricted capitalism as an unsustainable system is plain to see.
And btw even BACK THEN, economists tried to solve the riddle of what they saw as the inevitable end of capitalism, when all monies have been sucked up by the 'owners', and nothing is left for anyone else.
The illusion that capitalism worked in the US should have been dispelled by the Great Depression. But the US limped along through WWII, during which every other industrial nation was destroyed. And for a brief shining time in history, and thanks to a very particular set of historic circumstances, the US as *The Last Man Standing* was able to increase its wealth and export its poverty. Day-oh! Day-oh! Daylight come and I wanna' go home. The US rode high on its status as the sole exploiter of banana republics around the globe.
But that could never last, and now we're being swallowed in the maw of the Great Dickensian entropic death of Capitalism, as foreseen by economists over a century ago.

"But I can't tell you any alternative that does."

The only one I can think of that does is one that returns 100% of the value of labor back to society as a whole, instead of continuously siphoning off a fraction of that value at every turn of the manufacture / sale cycle and sequestering it away. Whether it's through government taxes, through cooperatives, or by some other means, I think 100% of labor value has to be returned to society. UK LeGuin, one of my favorite SciFi authors, posited a world where everybody was set to equally performing drudgery tasks - farming, reaping, cooking, cleaning, child-minding, shit-processing, house building, laundry, and so on - but after that, your time was your own. You could go anywhere and do anything and avail yourself of whatever you needed to survive, as long as you participated in your share of drudge work, wherever you were.

"What we need is a system that is a meritocracy at the core."

You know, it actually takes very little work for people to survive. And just a bit extra to support those who can't work. We're not so terribly burdened by the young, old, and disabled that we couldn't support everyone in security - as long as we don't have profits sucking off the value of our work at every step.

"But unfortunately with race/sex quotas and all of the other Democrat "malarkey" going on right now we're moving far away from that."

That's what happens when you're operating in a system designed to maximize profit - it creates scarcity. Owners try to minimize costs, so they minimize workers. That creates a scarcity of work. But work is survival.
When there are more than enough people who are completely capable of doing the job, how do you pick? You start creating artificial distinctions. You start trying to make sure you and yours get those jobs, instead of them and theirs. Only people with green eyes will do. Irish need not apply. HELP WANTED - MALE electrical apprentices.
But just doing the job should be good enough in a rational system.

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 3:07 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Biden is an idiot, but then, so are most candidates (and I mean both parties).

*****

To go waaaaay off-topic - AFA capitalism not working ... I could suggest several solutions but I'm not sure how well they'd work.

Let's look at the process of how this all goes wrong: let's sy that you have a business owner who treats his or her employees, suppliers, and customers fairly and manages to scrape up less profit than the guy/gal who screws everyone over. The asshole takes in higher profits, and manages to grow his/her business bigger (or buy up other businesses) and ... in an evolutionary process... the "nice guys/gas finish last".

I suppose there are several way to interrupt this process:

1) disallow high profits, via government taxation policies
2) break up big businesses to allow smaller ones to compete
3) disallow the business model that allows profits completely (there are laws that regulate how businesses are formed and what kinds of responsibilities each business has, like sole owner, DBA, partnerships, LLCs, corporations etc. I supposed someone knowledgeable about business law could advise us on where the laws could be tweaked. The Founding Fathers, with their experience with the Crown Corporation East India Compnay, had a healthy fear of corporations and would probably be shocked and horrified by today's situation.)
4) hand the really big business ... the natural monopolies like electrical, gas, and water utilities, natural resource extraction, telecom, roads, railways, ports, and infrastruture ... over to the government
5) somehow control the flow of money so that businesses could not be "bought" or "sold", only invested in

There is a class of business that needs to have its business model totally disrupted, and that's the banks. While we work for our money, banks just make it up. They're the only business that's allowed to (in essence) counterfeit money. And then they hand it out to their own hedge fund traders or to their big-business buddies who use cheap loans for things like stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers. I feel fairly confident that if banks could only lend money that they actually had, instead of expanding their cash-in-hand by a factor of 10 (fractional reserve lending) these financial shennanigans would come to a quick halt.

Anyway, needs some thought.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

Happy New Year, WISHY. I edited out your psychopathic screed!

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Thursday, January 2, 2020 6:53 AM

CAPTAINCRUNCH

... stay crunchy...

Quote:
Originally posted by WISHIMAY:
https://gizmodo.com/biden-to-coal-miners-learn-to-code-1840735758

Maybe one in 20 coal miners could read an average book in an average month. Many of them have never owned a computer (other than a cell phone), and I'm sure a few wouldn't know how to turn one on. And, yanno, there are just SOOOO many coding jobs up in them thar hills. It takes YEARS of expensive education to learn to code, even for someone so inclined.

Fucking politicians.

Fucking stupid planet.

They closed a few more coal mines here, and they are shutting down a couple more coal-based plants..

Don't see your idiot savior Trump doing anything for those people, either.

Which makes it all the more amusing that Trump's getting impeached because he control freaked over someone who probably wouldn't beat him in a fair fight anyway.
You can't have too much Gluttony.

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