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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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.....Does the US have an equivalent to Justin Trudeau? He brought his party back from a condition that was far worse than the Democrats are in now, in one election cycle. Granted, he didn't have to worry about voter suppression or gerrymandering (and the Canadian overton window is firmly in center/center-left) but charisma/decent policy/a hated incumbent/a good last name went a loooong way.
edited 23rd Nov '16 8:06:54 PM by Rationalinsanity
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.I say following with great reluctance cause it will make things worse over here.
USA has to prioritize making its existing citizens happy first. Basically, help yourself (your citizens) first before other countries. I long knew immigration, outsourcing was squeezing poor Americans, but I had ?falsely? assumed that the social services would make the squeeze bearable.
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.Immigration can be a strain on infrastructure. And we're not a post scarcity economy so there will be increased competition. I don't think blanket amnesty and absence of vetting or limits makes for an advisable policy in general.
That said as a rule immigration policies should be framed around absolute population and breakdown by age rather than any regard to ethnicity. Manpower is manpower, regardless of whether they're brown or yellow or pink or can rattle off the Gettsyburg address without an accent. For example Italy's native population growth is low enough that African migrants would not be a drain on their resources outside of mismanagement, and Japan's own population issues would easily be remedied by loosened immigration even if it's a hard pill for their culture to swallow. The US (at least at the time of the end of Obama's presidency) is in a situation where our economy is capable of accommodating many of those additional individuals, so all the scaremongering about them taking our jobs is dogwhistling,
edited 23rd Nov '16 8:26:03 PM by AlleyOop
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Immigration and outsourcing means more competition for limited resources (in this case - jobs). Plus, there's automation...
The best solution would be to force the 1% to share the wealth more equitably, but with Trump as POTUS - hah...
Anyway, as mentioned, I say so with great reluctance. My country's economy is 10% call centers.
edited 23rd Nov '16 8:16:33 PM by probablyinsane
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.On its current form immigration has a few problems, but it is mostly due to language barriers and the education level of the immigrants. Meaning the majority of them will have to settle for low skill and menial jobs.
Their children on the other hand will probably have more opportunities but they still have to leave the poverty trap.
Inter arma enim silent legesDon't immigrants create jobs due to how they contribute more in taxes then they take out? Also aren't imgirants normally working jobs that Americans refuse to take like fruit picking?
Also jobs going oversees isn't what's killing jobs in several sectors, it's automation meaning that one person can do a job that used to take 20. So unless we force companies to undo automation nothing can be done.
edited 23rd Nov '16 8:56:52 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranImmigration (on its own) isn't so bad; job-wise. Yes, mostly low skill work will be taken up by immigrants.
Immigration + Outsourcing though means factory jobs, white collar jobs.
Immigration + Outsourcing + Automation = why I wanted Bernie Sanders to run with HRC. Basic Income is still the only solution (I can see) to the Automation Apocalypse.
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.The issue with automation isn't the death of jobs, it is the work force migration to technology and service business.
Automation may have killed the manufacturing and mining business as large employers but to compensate newer work fields and business areas have been created by mostly the IT sector and service industries.
However they are technical and high skill fields, which means that you'd need to train all those blue collar workers to adapt to the new work market. This retraining isn't happening and so far it has been cheaper to seek the younger generations with higher technological affinity than it is to retrain and employ an aging workforce with relatively low scholarly and used to work in low skill jobs.
edited 24th Nov '16 6:45:58 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges![]()
My work is IT.
And it's one of the earliest sectors to be hit by automation. For example, webmasters (people who make / maintain websites) are threatened by Facebook.
Webhosting companies are threatened by Google and Amazon.
Server admins are threatened by the cloud. Apple, has HUGE complexes, ran by very few people.
Amazon has been replacing warehouse workers with Kiva robots.
edited 23rd Nov '16 9:30:42 PM by probablyinsane
Plants are aliens, and fungi are nanomachines.![]()
No. No they won't.
What they will be is Robo Trump 9.0, a futuristic mechanical version of our shouty orange with small hands that has Trump's brainwaves uploaded into its' database, insuring that it can continue God Emperor Trumps' reign for eons to come. Like you do.
edited 23rd Nov '16 9:56:22 PM by kkhohoho
Robo-Trump will waste all its time tweeting that the Robo-Obama's server is hosted in Kenya instead of America.
Robo-Hillary and Robo-Bernie meanwhile will continue to wage war over what direction the Democratic Party should take, while everyone in the DNC wonders why they thought making robot clones of both was a good idea.
Robo-Warren continues to be a thorn in the side of Robo-Wall Street.
Robo-Michelle is wisely staying out of politics, and instead spends its processing power making and uploading holo-vids with various diet and exercise tips.
Robo-Stein still can't get enough people to vote for her. Though this time her suspicions concerning so-called virus protection actually have some merit (yes I know she's gone on record stating she's not an anti-vaccer shut up this is just a joke)
Robo-Johnson is still baked on the robot version of weed. His programmers also neglected to include information such as "What is Aleppo".
Robo-Putin continues to spam everyone with fake news and memes.
The secret Resistance meanwhile spends its time devising the ultimate weapon to finally free themselves from Robo-Trump's (tiny) deathgrip: the world's biggest refrigerator magnet.
edited 23rd Nov '16 10:28:35 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprisedA bit of levity in these trying times: Barack Obama, carrying out the final Thanksgiving turkey pardon of his presidency, milked every goddamn second of it
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I expect he'd more do multiple rounds of pardoning then finish with two turkeys in guillotines about to drop and then picks which one to pardon at the last second. Think if the turkey pardoning was a shitty reality TV show then go from there.
That or do the pardoning with real people and bring them to the White House before pardoning one and sending the other back to prison.
edited 23rd Nov '16 10:41:07 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran@Automation: It doesn't destroy jobs. Demand is functionally infinite, so eliminating low skill jobs creating more potential openings in high skill fields. The issue with automation is the possibility of massive economic shocks resulting from entire categories of professions being eliminated overnight, leaving millions of people unemployed.
Speaking of Johnson:
When I was younger, I used to think the Libertarians were better than the GOP, because they were more ideologically consistent. The GOP, for the longest time, has been a party whose platform had to reconcile "the government should interfere as little as possible" with "the government should interfere in order to guarantee that christian fundamentalism's will is imposed on everyone, even those who don't believe in it". The Libertarians at least had an ethos that guided their entire platform, and as such they didn't support the regressive social mores of the GOP.
Now however I realize that in practice, that doesn't really matter that much, because in practice they'd just let people rot just like the GOP does, because they don't believe in intervening for almost ANY reason. It's ideologically indefensible because it operates on the premise that there basically should BE no government, which is self-defeating.

Or they're just in denial, like a lot of the Rust Belt.
The idea that your old job was doomed to eventually become irrelevant, and in fact has been so for some years, is an extremely bitter pill for them to swallow, even if you can promise them that they'll have new and potentially healthier jobs.