2020 Democratic Nominee

[Aqua Buddha 14522]

3 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

Bloombergmentum

This is underrated.  Bloomberg is #3 and moving up fast despite only being in the race but a month or so and not being in the debates.  There is the matter of the $250M spent so there's that.  Biden is "Mr Electability" but he'll lose Iowa and New Hampshire.  Bloomberg's rise is the most underrated thing in the media right now.

No way in hell the Democratic Part nominates Bern.

[BradInATX 9208]

The perfect way to combat the last four years of the government bleeding the middle class to enrich the already-rich is to let a billionaire buy himself into contention.
Go Bloomberg go! USA USA

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/04/elections-2018-democrats-history-liberal-progressive-socialist-222187
White Suburban Democrats don't know history
"Democrats Aren’t Moving Left. They’re Returning to Their Roots.
Many on both sides are worried about the party’s leftward swing. They say it’s a deviation from the mainstream. It’s not.

Be advised: “Democrats are in danger of going too far left in 2018.” So warn Republicans like Mitt Romney and ex-Democrats like Joe Lieberman and public personae as diverse as James Comey and Howard Schultz. In recent months, the pundit class has determined that the party’s leftward lurch heralds the rise of a “liberal tea party”—a movement that could very well unmoor Democrats from their longstanding center-left traditions, in close imitation of the spiral of events that caused the Republican Party to turn sharply to the right in recent years.

What’s fueling this argument? For one, more Democrats have rallied, either noisily or cautiously, around such policy innovations as “Medicare for all,” universal college and a universal basic income. That a smattering of Democratic candidates have elected to call themselves “democratic socialists” has only fueled the claim that such programs are “socialist.” “The center is Harry Truman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, not Eugene Debs and Michael Harrington,” warned New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens recently. (Debs and Harrington were self-identified socialists.)

But there’s something wrong with this historical interpretation: Truman strongly supported single-payer health care. Moynihan supported a universal basic income in the 1960s. Dating back to World War II, Democrats sought to make a government-paid education available to as many Americans as possible. If Democrats are marching to the left, that road leads directly back to platforms and politicians who, in their day, commanded wide support and existed firmly in the mainstream of political thought. 

What’s more, to label these programs “socialist”—which is to say, far outside the center of the political spectrum—reveals a constrained worldview. For over six decades, center-right parties in Europe—in Britain and France, Germany and Austria, and almost everywhere between—have either participated in or acceded to the very same policies.

In a remarkable way, today’s debate today strongly resembles a broader discussion that occurred in the United States and Europe in the 1940s, amid wartime mobilization and economic reconstruction, and in the decades following. 

It’s perfectly reasonable to dispute the progressive agenda on its merits. There are strong policy arguments running in both directions. But to argue that it breaks with the party’s roots, or that it falls dangerously outside the mainstream, is ahistorical."

I’ve said this before, but Elizabeth Warren isn’t even a leftist exactly. She’s more like a normal labor liberal in like 1965.

[GSU&UT 1798]

32 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I’ve said this before, but Elizabeth Warren isn’t even a leftist exactly. She’s more like a normal labor liberal in like 1965.

I don't think us self-identified leftists are going to disagree.

[Js1 85112]

4 days after dropping out, Castro endorses Warren. Let’s be real, he was never going to endorse anyone else. He wants that Veep spot

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

Edited January 6, 2020 by Hugo Stiglitz

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

14 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

Cool... so... what?

Ok.

So that's the appeal of Biden and where his voters are coming from. Nobody is thrilled about it, but he's a choice that you can build a majority around, because he nominally checks most of the boxes for a plurality of the coalition and for the rest of a majority, he's the least worse thing. I'm not saying that's an awesome place to be, but it's where we are. 

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

36 minutes ago, Js1 said:

4 days after dropping out, Castro endorses Warren. Let’s be real, he was never going to endorse anyone else. He wants that Veep spot

oh big time. And he would be the ideal VP choice for her, and a good choice for Bloomberg as well. 

Edited January 6, 2020 by Bozo_Casanova

[bad_teammate 13132]

So that's the appeal of Biden and where his voters are coming from. Nobody is thrilled about it, but he's a choice that you can build a majority around, because he nominally checks most of the boxes for a plurality of the coalition and for the rest of a majority, he's the least worse thing. I'm not saying that's an awesome place to be, but it's where we are. 

If it's such an obvious thing that Biden brings in more people, why is he not doing better?

He's usually 3rd in money and probably 4th in small dollars. His crowds are anemic. There's no visible enthusiasm for him.

Even in the polls he's winning his voters aren't particularly enthusiastic or locked in.

Enthusiasm is everything in GOTV.

[Biff Tannen 45499]

50 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

Good.  I don't know how Warren has slipped lately, but she needs to be back in the top 3 ASAP.

[horncyclist 1386]

7 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Good.  I don't know how Warren has slipped lately, but she needs to be back in the top 3 ASAP.

She's ticking back up in the polls. Really well positioned to in my view.

[Js1 85112]

7 minutes ago, horncyclist said:

She's ticking back up in the polls. Really well positioned to in my view.

RCP average says what? 

[sachick 1189]

I'm realizing I will be really really disappointed if Biden or Bernie get the nomination. I'll vote for them of course, but it would be very uninspiring.

[Brisketexan 104628]

11 minutes ago, sachick said:

I'm realizing I will be really really disappointed if Biden or Bernie get the nomination. I'll vote for them of course, but it would be very uninspiring.

1) Prepare to be uninspired.

2) Prepare for four more years of Trump.

[Biff Tannen 45499]

2 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

1) Prepare to be uninspired.

2) Prepare for four more years of Trump.

fixed

[sachick 1189]

13 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

1) Prepare to be uninspired.

2) Prepare for four more years of Trump.

[Brisketexan 104628]

3 minutes ago, sachick said:

Sorry.  I'm just really good at being the bearer of bad news.  For example, those pants DO make your butt look big, Texas is NOT back, cedar hasn't peaked yet this year, and Austin traffic will never get better, it will only get worse.

[workswithseed 2037]

 

[BradInATX 9208]

9 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

 

Watched 40 seconds until I got to his stupid little "robot lawyer" skit, when it became plainly obvious that this guy, much like you, has no grasp of the issues and have zero real intention to try to understand them. I realize the concept is kind of funny, and people like you need things simplified for them, but it's intellectually dishonest.

"Robot lawyers" has nothing to do with a literal robot replacing the lawyer that goes to trial with you. If you truly want to learn about how automation will impact the legal industry, you're free to read about it. But my guess is you have no true intellectual curiosity regarding the subject, so I'm not going to waste my time, for the same reason a nutritionist isn't going to attempt to explain to a class full of four year olds why too many cookies are bad.

Edited January 6, 2020 by BradInATX

[workswithseed 2037]

Just now, BradInATX said:

Watched 40 seconds until I got to his stupid little "robot lawyer" skit, when it became plainly obvious that this guy, much like you, has no grasp of the issues and have zero real intention to try to understand them. 

"Robot lawyers" has nothing to do with a literal robot replacing the lawyer that goes to trial with you. If you truly want to learn about how automation will impact the legal industry, you're free to read about it. But my guess is you have no true intellectual curiosity regarding the subject, so I'm not going to waste my time, for the same reason a nutritionist isn't going to attempt to explain to a class full of four year olds why too many cookies are bad.

Jesus, gets mad over a joke.

 

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/lawyers-could-be-replaced-by-artificial-intelligence.html

“I think we will see a rise of more jobs in the legal market” as a result of AI,”

Everything I saw was from 2017, if you got something more recent.

 

[BradInATX 9208]

8 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

Jesus, gets mad over a joke.

 

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/lawyers-could-be-replaced-by-artificial-intelligence.html

“I think we will see a rise of more jobs in the legal market” as a result of AI,”

Everything I saw was from 2017, if you got something more recent.

 

I hate intellectual dishonesty. That guy in the video is a skinny fat moron trying to pass off a lack of understanding of nuance as some sort of "I'm a super smart sarcastic guy!" persona. He's an idiot.

Also, your quote about seeing a rise of jobs in the legal market is literally the CEO of one of the firms replacing live people with AI. LOL. Does he, or you, have any empirical data?

Look dude, I'm all about technology and automation. And unlike yourself, I'm in a field where automation presents almost zero risk to my livelihood. It's actually probably the opposite - as AI and automation develop, my end-product will become more powerful for my clients. In the "you're either replaced by the robots or you build the robots" hypothetical, I build the robots. I can't wait to downsize our driveway to one car and call an Uber to take me to the grocery store, without an annoying driver to force conversation with. I'm all about it. I'm a technocrat in every sense of the word. I work in tech. I love tech. I use machine learning and pseudo-AI to do my work, and I make a great living because of it. 

But let's not be stupid and pretend that it's not going to create significant issues that need to be addressed, particularly re:employment in a bunch of sectors (legal being WAYYYY down the list). You're just burying your head in the sand.

Edited January 6, 2020 by BradInATX

[workswithseed 2037]

I asked for you to give me data, you gave me opinion. I mean I love that automation has let me sit on my ass more, thanks.

[BradInATX 9208]

53 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

I asked for you to give me data, you gave me opinion. I mean I love that automation has let me sit on my ass more, thanks.

I'm not spending any energy proving to you something that's accepted science at this point. Should I convince you that the earth is round, as well? 

You're a farmer, homeboy. If I ever have the need to understand more about tractors, I'll ask you. But until then, you should stick to things that are within your depth. Automation is going to kill millions of jobs. Period. And unlike your stupid whale oil analogy, more jobs are not going to be created. There's no parallel between that and the loss of five million or so trucking and trucking support jobs.

Edited January 6, 2020 by BradInATX

[washparkhorn 9935]

Stop saying Biden is the 'most electable'. Trump will run rings round him

Did we learn nothing from 2016? Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians – and Biden would lose

Supporters of Joe Biden are unlikely to be persuaded by most of the common criticisms. They know he can be rambling and unintelligible. They know his record is unimpressive and that he doesn’t really have “policy proposals”. None of this matters, though, because to them he has the most important quality of all: he can beat Donald Trump. Nothing you can say about the former vice-president’s record, platform or mental state matters next to the argument that he is the best hope Democrats have of getting Trump out of office.

There’s just one problem: it’s a myth. It is a myth just as it was a myth that Hillary Clinton was a good candidate against Trump. Biden is not, in fact, the pragmatic choice. He would not beat Trump. He would lose. And we must say this over and over again. Forget his flubs. Forget his finger-nibbling. Biden would be crushed by Trump. If you want Trump out of office, don’t support Biden.

Last time round, Clinton supporters lived in a strange kind of denial. Anyone could see she had unique vulnerabilities Trump could exploit. She was a Wall Street candidate, and he was running to “drain the swamp”. She was under investigation by the FBI, and his pitch was that Washington was corrupt. She had supported the catastrophic Iraq war, and he portrayed himself as an outsider opponent of those wars. Trump could “run to her left” and make criticisms she would be unable to respond to, because they were accurate. Clinton’s attempts to attack Trump as an out-of-touch, reckless billionaire sex criminal would fail, because Trump would point out that she herself was out of touch, bought by billionaires and had an unrepentant alleged sex criminal as her husband and chief campaign surrogate.

Joe Biden will face many of the same problems. He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the “capital of corporate America”. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war. Even Matthew Yglesias of Vox calls Biden the “Hillary Clinton of 2020” for his corporate ties and war support. It is worth remembering what being the “Hillary Clinton” of anything means in an election against Trump.

Consider the Ukraine scandal, which is far worse for Biden electorally than usually acknowledged. Democrats have made this the centerpiece of their impeachment case against Trump, setting aside Trump’s most consequential crimes in order to focus on the charge that Trump tried to force the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden. For Democrats, the scandal is clear-cut: Trump was abusing the power of his office to “damage a political rival”. And they believe that the American people will agree, and will be disturbed by Trump’s unethical behavior. They insist there was “no evidence” that Joe Biden did anything wrong, and that Trump and his associates have been unfairly trying to smear Biden.

Democrats who think this way are walking into a buzzsaw. Let us recall: Hunter Biden was paid up to $50,000 a month by a Ukrainian oil company. Officially, the chief Ukrainian prosecutor had an open investigation into that company. Joe Biden bragged about pressuring Ukraine to fire that prosecutor, which they did. Hunter Biden says he told his father about his position in Ukraine, and Joe Biden did not ask him to step down. Joe Biden contradicts his son’s story, saying they never discussed Hunter Biden’s “work” in Ukraine. One of them is not telling the truth.

Defenders of the Bidens like to point out that the prosecutor was fired for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with Hunter Biden. In fact, there was widespread pressure to fire the prosecutor because he wasn’t doing enough on corruption investigations, and there was a consensus among experts that this was the case. Biden’s actions had absolutely nothing to do with his son and it is ridiculous to suggest that they did.

All this is true. But the important question is: does it sound good? And the answer is: no. It sounds terrible.

One reason Democrats are bad at politics is that they concern themselves too much with facts and not enough with impressions. With Clinton’s “emails scandal”, they tried to show Clinton had not technically violated the law, but having Barack Obama’s FBI actively investigating Clinton for possible criminal wrongdoing looked terrible regardless of the facts.

Left-leaning journalists and pundits love to “fact-check” Trump, as if proving that he has lied is in itself persuasive. But 2016 should have showed us how powerless “debunking” is next to “optics”. If you have a Democratic candidate who looks really corrupt, it doesn’t matter if they’re not. People don’t trust the press and they don’t trust politicians.

Imagine Biden running against Trump. Trump will run ads like this, over and over. Good luck responding. Remember that time you have to spend defending yourself against Trump’s accusations is time not spent talking about issues that affect people’s lives. And Biden has already shown little interest in drawing people’s attention to the areas where Democrats should run strong against Trump, such as healthcare, taxation, working conditions and the climate crisis.

His slogan is “no malarkey”, but since Biden himself is a longtime spewer of malarkey, Trump will successfully paint Biden as a hypocrite. Biden’s central case is that he is “not Trump”, that he will return the country to virtuousness and decency. But if Biden doesn’t actually look virtuous and decent – because he isn’t – the argument that he has made for himself collapses completely.

Biden does have some strengths against Trump that Clinton did not. We mock his rambling and tendency for “gaffes”, but these do mean he never sounds like a “scripted politician”. Clinton was criticized as robotic and focus-grouped. Biden is anything but focus-grouped; whatever pops into his head comes out his mouth.

At the same time, compared to Trump, Biden has:

• No money
• No voter enthusiasm
• No organization
• No agenda
• No real argument for himself

Ask yourself: how likely is such a candidate to win? Is such a person really the one you want to run against Trump? Look at the enthusiasm Trump gets at his rallies. It is real. Trump has fans, and they’re highly motivated. How motivated are Biden’s “fans”? Is Biden going to fill stadiums? Are people going to crisscross the country knocking on doors for him? Say what you want about Clinton, but there were some truly committed Clinton fans, and she had a powerful base of support. By comparison, Biden looks weak, and Trump is savagely effective at preying on and destroying establishment politicians.

Complicated factchecks that attempt to explain the nuances of the Ukrainian criminal prosecution system will not help Biden. People’s already limited enthusiasm for Biden will further wane, and Trump will point to his “strong economy” and “job creation” as evidence Obama and Biden were weak failures. Biden will look tired and irrelevant, and possibly forget why he is even running in the first place. Trump will be re-elected comfortably.

If there are Biden supporters in your life, you need to have serious conversations with them. Do not dwell on things that do not matter to them, like Biden’s record on bussing, or his latest nonsensical comment. Instead, keep the focus on the main argument that is sustaining his campaign: the idea that he is the best candidate to beat Trump. He isn’t. His electability is a myth, and when we look honestly at the facts we can see that Biden is actually a dangerously poor candidate to run.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/04/joe-biden-electable-trump-2020-election

 

[LABEVO 928]

16 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

This is underrated.  Bloomberg is #3 and moving up fast despite only being in the race but a month or so and not being in the debates.  There is the matter of the $250M spent so there's that.  Biden is "Mr Electability" but he'll lose Iowa and New Hampshire.  Bloomberg's rise is the most underrated thing in the media right now.

No way in hell the Democratic Part nominates Bern.

I read it differently. Candidate preference among majority of voters is very weak and once any individual gets traction then voters have no issue switching. Bloomberg has no way in hell winning but shows that money can make someone relevant (e.g. Buttigieg). 

Candidates that have an impassioned based will likely to be the front runners (e.g. Sanders and Warren)

Edited January 6, 2020 by LABEVO

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

I don't understand what you guys are talking about. Automation isn't "going to" kill millions of jobs. The "value capture" around ERP, CRM, and other business process automation that has been well underway for two decades already has done that by eliminating routine tasks of coordination between functional silos, supply chain inefficiencies, information float, etc. Those jobs went away in the mid 2000s and didn't come back because SAP and Oracle and Salesforce do them now, freeing people up for either more valuable work or less valuable work. But the jobs they used to do are gone. 

Think of a "job" as a gap - it's a thing a parson needs to do in an organization to facilitate a transaction. If if your job is repetitive in nature, or deals with the conversion of information into coordinated action, or represents pure cost/overhead, it's a good candidate for automation, because automation is great at closing gaps. 

[TexEx15 17487]

 

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

23 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

Stop saying Biden is the 'most electable'. Trump will run rings round him

Did we learn nothing from 2016? Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians – and Biden would lose

 

Yep, it's a bad place to be. Pete is just not there yet, Klobuchar stumbled out of the gates, and Kamala Harris organization imploded. I think there's a scenario where Bloomberg breaks out, which also isn't great. 

[workswithseed 2037]

If AI is making a gap more efficient, that seems like there would still need jobs needed for the extra work that it would create. Do y'all think machines will take over all jobs at every end in 30 years?

[Hugo Stiglitz 23356]

3 hours ago, Js1 said:

RCP average says what? 

Warren is still the only candidate thus far to overtake Biden in that indicator, which means about as much as the RCP average itself.

[F250 28691]

22 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I don't understand what you guys are talking about. Automation isn't "going to" kill millions of jobs. The "value capture" around ERP, CRM, and other business process automation that has been well underway for two decades already has done that by eliminating routine tasks of coordination between functional silos, supply chain inefficiencies, information float, etc. Those jobs went away in the mid 2000s and didn't come back because SAP and Oracle and Salesforce do them now, freeing people up for either more valuable work or less valuable work. But the jobs they used to do are gone. 

During that move in the mid 2000's a lot of organizations invested heavily in IT to implement and maintain these programs which did create a lot of jobs in the IT industry. But due to automation and the cloud, a lot of those IT jobs are vanishing while the process of rolling out and maintaining an ERP system has become a lot more efficient.

[Biff Tannen 45499]

42 minutes ago, TexEx15 said:

 

wuuuuuut

[BradInATX 9208]

1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

I don't understand what you guys are talking about. Automation isn't "going to" kill millions of jobs. The "value capture" around ERP, CRM, and other business process automation that has been well underway for two decades already has done that by eliminating routine tasks of coordination between functional silos, supply chain inefficiencies, information float, etc. Those jobs went away in the mid 2000s and didn't come back because SAP and Oracle and Salesforce do them now, freeing people up for either more valuable work or less valuable work. But the jobs they used to do are gone. 

Think of a "job" as a gap - it's a thing a parson needs to do in an organization to facilitate a transaction. If if your job is repetitive in nature, or deals with the conversion of information into coordinated action, or represents pure cost/overhead, it's a good candidate for automation, because automation is great at closing gaps. 

What are five million truck drivers and trucking support staff going to do?

There are only so many billionaires that need more servants.

Edited January 6, 2020 by BradInATX

[atomheartbevo 89449]

7 hours ago, BradInATX said:

The perfect way to combat the last four years of the government bleeding the middle class to enrich the already-rich is to let a billionaire buy himself into contention.
Go Bloomberg go! USA USA

It would cause a meltdown with Trump, especially if Bloomberg released his financials and implied Trump was scared to match tax returns.   Iran would end up getting nuked.   

[atomheartbevo 89449]

2 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

Stop saying Biden is the 'most electable'. Trump will run rings round him

Did we learn nothing from 2016? Trump is savagely effective at destroying establishment politicians – and Biden would lose

 

Hillary Clinton had decades of baggage, Benghazi, etc. and she had decades of Rush and Fox News going after her in a way that is not even close to Biden.   

[bad_teammate 13132]

Federal regulations should require a supervisory driver in every self-driving vehicle.

[washparkhorn 9935]

 

[bad_teammate 13132]

Lying about your record is smart politics. Respect, Joe.

[Biff Tannen 45499]

13 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

Federal regulations should require a supervisory driver in every self-driving vehicle.

Let's bring back the guys in the elevators who push the buttons for you too.

[elfenix 34172]

"endless"
A regular one? Well, hell, that's why democracy is here for!!

Well, yeah.

[bad_teammate 13132]

12 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

Let's bring back the guys in the elevators who push the buttons for you too.

And bathroom attendants. Sounds awesome.

I hate this technofuture hell dream where we are increasingly isolated from other humans even while we see how horrible that is for us.

It would be badass if we had AI and robots doing all the dangerous work and we just paid each other good wages to do nice services for each other.

[henrygandorf 29179]

34 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Hillary Clinton had decades of baggage, Benghazi, etc. and she had decades of Rush and Fox News going after her in a way that is not even close to Biden.   

hillary also won the popular vote by 3mm.  and that's the last nice thing i'm going to say about her this month.

that said, pretty much any dem will beat trump in the popular vote by this much or more.

[Js1 85112]

14 minutes ago, henrygandorf said:

hillary also won the popular vote by 3mm.  and that's the last nice thing i'm going to say about her this month.

that said, pretty much any dem will beat trump in the popular vote by this much or more.

People think Joe is dumb but guess what? He’s 100x more like-able and relate-able and personable than HRC. 

These things matter. 

[henrygandorf 29179]

2 minutes ago, Js1 said:

People think Joe is dumb but guess what? He’s 100x more like-able and relate-able and personable than HRC. 

These things matter. 

the whole comparison is silly.  there's plenty of bad shit you can pin on hrc, but the fact that she lost an election doesn't make her "unelectable".  a lot had to go wrong in very specific areas for that to happen, and her campaign was horribly mismanaged to boot. 

i think biden is plenty "electable" mostly because he's familiar and many just want trump gone, and they feel that he's the least polarizing or risky pick.  they might be right, but we may never know.  the fact that people point to electability because there's not much else to point to is definitely worrying.

to say "trump would run circles around him" or whatever is being said is silly.  the country is so partisan right now, i really don't see head-to-head shit like that mattering that much.  the fact that joe is seen as basically a "nice guy" and trump is seen as an "asshole" (even by his supporters) would probably carry more weight.  this is the country we live in right now.

in a biden vs trump election (or anybody vs trump really), policy and gaffes and whatever would normally matter, sadly just doesn't.

what will matter is voter turnout.  and with biden, that could be a real bummer.  that said, 2016 had plenty of people showing up just to "vote against hillary".  biden is not that candidate.  nobody on the dem side is.

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

1 hour ago, BradInATX said:

What are five million truck drivers and trucking support staff going to do?

There are only so many billionaires that need more servants.

Here's a piece in HBR temporizing that it won't until it does except where it already has and by that time there won't be that many drivers and these things take time because the infrastructure and controls won't be in place until they are and maybe some of it will be against the law or maybe not???  

 

 

[Bozo_Casanova 26284]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

And bathroom attendants. Sounds awesome.

I hate this technofuture hell dream where we are increasingly isolated from other humans even while we see how horrible that is for us.

It would be badass if we had AI and robots doing all the dangerous work and we just paid each other good wages to do nice services for each other.

At one time the labor movement in the country looked to automation and machinery to create a golden age of leisure, peace and abundance for all. And it still could, but we would need to restore the social contract to the benefit of workers.

I'm very surprised Warren or Bernie aren't making "work less, make more" a central thematic pillar of their value proposition to voters. Warren is trying to, but shes drowning it in policy specifics. 

Edited January 6, 2020 by Bozo_Casanova

[bad_teammate 13132]

Bernie has expressed openness to a shorter work week when asked, but neither he nor Warren are really leftist candidates. In the global scheme, they're left-center.

A major problem we have is that we don't have a political party that comes from the labor movement. The Democrats briefly attached themselves to labor for power, but that's not how they started and they quickly abandoned labor.

This is why Bernie's project of remaking the Democratic party is so important.

[washparkhorn 9935]

21 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

At one time the labor movement in the country looked to automation and machinery to create a golden age of leisure, peace and abundance for all. And it still could, but we would need to restore the social contract to the benefit of workers.

I'm very surprised Warren or Bernie aren't making "work less, make more" a central thematic pillar of their value proposition to voters. Warren is trying to, but shes drowning it in policy specifics. 

The Green New Deal is bandied about in the corporate media as a scare phrase, but not discussed. 

The Green New Deal pairs labor programs with measures to combat the climate crisis. Both require attention as neoliberal policies have unloaded enourmous environmental and labor burdens on the world. Austerity policies are used to eliminate labor under the guise of efficiency. 
 

There is valuable work to be done to absorb the negative externalities of neoliberal policies on the environment and labor. The GND addresses both.
 

ACO and Sanders are vocal supporters of the Green New Deal labor and environmental proposals. 

[Brisketexan 104628]

2 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

And bathroom attendants. Sounds awesome.

I hate this technofuture hell dream where we are increasingly isolated from other humans even while we see how horrible that is for us.

It would be badass if we had AI and robots doing all the dangerous work and we just paid each other good wages to do nice services for each other.

You're going to get a happy ending from a robot masseuse, so get used to it.

Also, on the automation issue, and even in a larger sense, the transformation of our economy from being labor-intensive to service-intensive, is the question that looms over our future.  And I put it in harsh terms, to avoid ambiguity: what are we going to do with our morons?

Understand that by definition, 50% of Americans are of below-median intelligence.  Not everyone can grow up to be a computer programmer, doctor, engineer, etc.  We used to have a HUGE job sector for folks on the lower end of the intelligence band: for the longest time, it was agriculture (while it takes some common sense and a solid work ethic, you didn't need to be a genius to farm).  Then, as we became less agrarian, we filled that gap by becoming a manufacturing society.  Again, while it takes some common sense, it doesn't take a genius IQ to work most assembly lines.  And the point is, all of that is good, honest work.  Work that for a long time, could provide for a person/family.  When those jobs go away (or more particularly, when the types of those jobs that pay a living wage or better go away), what are we going to do with the folks who used to fill them?

What are we going to do with the farm workers, the coal miners, and the wrench-turners on the assembly line now?  Sure, there are some jobs that may work in substitute, but not in the numbers needed to occupy that full segment of the work force.  All people should have a path that allows for dignity and self-sufficiency.  If we don't answer that question correctly -- whether it's AI or something else that's making it a pressing question -- our society is fucked.  I'm listening to anyone who has good ideas about it -- right, left, I don't care.  Acknowledge the problem and brainstorm solutions, that's what we need.

[BradInATX 9208]

You're going to get a happy ending from a robot masseuse, so get used to it.
Also, on the automation issue, and even in a larger sense, the transformation of our economy from being labor-intensive to service-intensive, is the question that looms over our future.  And I put it in harsh terms, to avoid ambiguity: what are we going to do with our morons?
Understand that by definition, 50% of Americans are of below-median intelligence.  Not everyone can grow up to be a computer programmer, doctor, engineer, etc.  We used to have a HUGE job sector for folks on the lower end of the intelligence band: for the longest time, it was agriculture (while it takes some common sense and a solid work ethic, you didn't need to be a genius to farm).  Then, as we became less agrarian, we filled that gap by becoming a manufacturing society.  Again, while it takes some common sense, it doesn't take a genius IQ to work most assembly lines.  And the point is, all of that is good, honest work.  Work that for a long time, could provide for a person/family.  When those jobs go away (or more particularly, when the types of those jobs that pay a living wage or better go away), what are we going to do with the folks who used to fill them?
What are we going to do with the farm workers, the coal miners, and the wrench-turners on the assembly line now?  Sure, there are some jobs that may work in substitute, but not in the numbers needed to occupy that full segment of the work force.  All people should have a path that allows for dignity and self-sufficiency.  If we don't answer that question correctly -- whether it's AI or something else that's making it a pressing question -- our society is fucked.  I'm listening to anyone who has good ideas about it -- right, left, I don't care.  Acknowledge the problem and brainstorm solutions, that's what we need.

Well said. The difference between modern automation and the past is that now for every 1,000 well-paying blue collar jobs we automate, we create 50 high paying STEM jobs, not additional blue collar work.
The person that cleans the shower stalls at the truck stop isn't going to learn to code.