1 This idea of robots that fix themselves is bullshit

2 Oh, and...FIRST

3 We are becoming more sophisticated technologically, but our people are poorly educated, intellectually lazy and lacking motivation. The advent of first the television and later the personal computer, the breakdown of the family unit, and our generally wretched teaching methods are the primary culprits.

4 Those millions and millions of unemployed people aren't simply going to disappear just because they're inconvenient.

Oh, yeah? Watch this: presto, changeo, disappearo! See? Gone.

Until a Republican president gets elected, that is. Then hoo, boy, are they gonna be back!

5

6 The answer is simple, but distasteful in today's society
We simply repeal all laws designed to protect stupid people.

7 I do not think you can discount the costs imposed on labor in our advanced economy either. Machines (robots) take the place of humans, true, but the real job killer is cost (taxes, unions, regulation).

8 I was told there was to be no maths on this blog.

9 How cheerful!

10 This idea of robots that fix themselves is bullshit

-------

Many robots already do this to some degree (space probes, complex computer systems, industrial robots).

11 That was a lot of words, so I had my robot read it.

12 Until we build robots that can function as consumers, this problem is self-correcting.

13 Here's what we do.. we lure the dullards in the country to someplace like Detroit on some pretense that they will receive a free Obamaphone or sumpthin.. Then we nuke it. Voila!

14 Perhaps if we had a government that would quit printing money at a prodigious rate, the cost of living would not be out of reach for those who cannot move up the earnings ladder. There is no machine that can bag my groceries, but the person who does that job cannot make a living wage because of inflation (among other factors, certainly). Instead of instituting government handouts to those of limited abilities, perhaps we should consider managing the economy so that even those in menial labor can afford food, clothing and shelter.


And maybe we should inform folks that the first thing to buy is not a big screen TV or a Cadillac with pimp rims.

15 Jerry, my way is slower, but much more entertaining

16 That's also called a Normal distribution.

17 .....to some degree.... ***** Bingo

18 This idea of robots that fix themselves is bullshit It's coming. Trust me on that (and not just because of my nic). In the mean time, surplus populations will mean what they always have--unrest and war. Until the drones can replace human boots on the ground. Then it's Thunderdome for ratings. ...at least until something pulls the plug on our tech base.

19 Has anyone thought of using them as batteries to power our machines?

20 What the hell does this have to do with lemurs?

21 "that machines are obviating the need for humans in many parts of our high-tech globalized economy"

Especially in office work, where entry level skills were easy. Couple of years ago I watched two secretaries...er, assistants put out a mailing to over 100 people in one day. I thought, this would have taken 10 people a week to do 20 years ago.

So, many fewer jobs to get just to help out the family or make a modest living.

22 I think A LOT of the morass we find the job market in is directly attributable to government regulation overload added to the intended and unintended consequences to federal reserve policy ongoing now for twenty years. ( think too Barny/Frank, Dodd/Frank, Obamacare, tax code, EPA, etc )

Add to that your book's notion of a natural shift in work, but I think without the above, this could be overcome and would not be as pronounced as it is.

anyway, I doubt I'll go see this movie.  Thanks for the review.

23 I came in here thinking there wound be more pictures of hills and fences.  What's going on here?

24 " I donÂ’t agree with everything the authors say, but overall I find the argument compelling." -- I'm not criticizing Monty for saying this; I do it all the time. But I think it's worth noting that it's a clear indication of the drastic decreasing in average reader intelligence and reasoning capabilities that statements like these have become de rigeur in modern American expressions of opinion.

25 I think, Dastardly, you may be onto something .. although we don't have to repeal anything, we just leave the enforcement up to the dullards themselves - see the recent rash of deaths in the NYC subway due to youtube wannabees.

26 I've said for a while that a big part of the problem is that destruction side of "creative destruction" *will* happen, but due to regulations and restrictions the creative side is mostly smothered.

27 @24..   bwahahaaa

28 Of course, in the olden days of the '60s, all the boys would go and do the corn harvest every summer to make money. Even the rich kids went. The parents thought it built character or something. Racists, probably.

29 Yea but what about the Lemurs?

30 Until they come up with a machine that can automatically update Java, Quicktime and Flash via Group Policy, I'm pretty safe.

31 So a pic of a "curve" brought on the tiny print this time? It's Monty so I will not complain. Just happy to know he's still among us. I raise a glass (of orange juice) to you sir and bid you joy and happiness all the days of your life. Must go get stuff done. Love each other...

32 This dystopian future was brought to you by Monty. Check him out at Doom dealer near you! And sadly, you're spot on.

33 Cannon fodder.

34 24: Actually, it's not that folks are becoming all that much dumber (misinformed, for sure, but...) It's just that the results stick out more. "Life's hard, it's harder when you're stupid!" And when you screw up, everyone can see it...

35 Unfortunately, I think you are presenting what will be a major problem for the US and humanity in general in the coming years/decades.  In point of fact, it is clear that this is already a problem in our own society, but as with so many problems it cannot be recognized by the politically correct. 


I learned a while back that Gauss' distribution curve is very representative of all large statistical populations and thus will be a good approximation for generalized human performance no matter how you try to fudge the evaluation "test" or indeed even what the nature of the test is.  Of course, now that Obama and the progs are in charge, I expect an attempt to shift the curve by eliminating the right hand side "outliers".  The IPAB is one such tool. 

36 28 Of course, in the olden days of the '60s, all the boys would go and do the corn harvest every summer to make money. Even the rich kids went. The parents thought it built character or something. Racists, probably.

Posted by: PJ at May 04, 2013 12:09 PM (ZWaLo)

In AK, it was the slime line at the fish processing plant. Now those jobs go to Mexicans, mostly, and they don't get the overtime we used to get by staying as long as we could after a 10 hour shift when the fish came in.

Regulations, and attitudes, and porous southern borders.

37 acat,
If we repeal the requirement for labels and interlocks on power equipment, the production costs will go down.Also, ban lawsuits against manufacturers whent he equipment is used for a purpose for which it was not intended.  For example, using a push lawnmower to prune a hedge, losing the tips of fingers in the process.

38 All robot should have a easily accessible kill switch and not be able to turn themselves on.

39 Has anyone thought of using them as batteries to power our machines? Posted by: The Matrix at May 04, 2013 12:07 PM (29vnO) Dumbest. &$#@(*$. Plot Point. Ever.

40 So all the Muslims we're importing won't even have to build their own bombs? There'll be machines that do that?

41 OK, so here is something that you won't want to consider.

What if there is a racial component to this?

What if certain races are clustered unequally along the curve?

What if certain races predominate along the left side of the bell curve, certain races predominate along the right side of the bell curve, and certain races are more equally distributed?

What then?

42 12 Until we build robots that can function as consumers, this problem is self-correcting.

***

I have explained this to my robot paranoid colleagues for years.  You can't justify robots without a massive market.  Robots are typically used in production lines that produce in some cases millions of one product per day.  They have made certain goods so cheap relative to what they would cost with human labor that even people who are considered lower income or poor can afford to have these goods.

43 Taco, so what?
All men are created equal.
period

44

After that in-depth discussion of Lemurs this shit is easy.

45 Offworld colonies. Assuming the damned skin-jobs don't take all the good work.

46 What if certain races predominate along the left side of the bell curve, certain races predominate along the right side of the bell curve, and certain races are more equally distributed? What then? You don't want to go there. Take it from us

47 What if certain races predominate along the left side of the bell curve, certain races predominate along the right side of the bell curve, and certain races are more equally distributed?

What then?

*****

Then SHUT UP

48 Assuming the damned skin-jobs don't take all the good work. Don't be silly, we have the toasters for...ooohhh.

49 Posted by: tcn at May 04, 2013 12:11 PM (VLG62)

The first full-time job I had, I hit overtime on Thursday.  That job no longer exists!

50 What if certain races predominate along the left side of the bell curve,
certain races predominate along the right side of the bell curve, and
certain races are more equally distributed


***********
The won't.
Stupid is universal

51 Dumbest. &$#@(*$. Plot Point. Ever.

Posted by: zsasz at May 04, 2013 12:11 PM (MMC8r)

Wanna bet?

52 What a cheery article!

53 All of the millions of unemployeed will have nothing to do but lemurbate.

54 I suspect that this is a question the owner (ace) won't want to touch.

I don't blame him.

It is personal and professional suicide in today's culture.

55 Actually, with advances in biotechnology, cybernetics, and neural science, this CAN potentially be remedied.  But, initially, it won't be cheap.  But eventually, implants and "brain crutches" will be able to remedy this.  

Unless, of course, someone takes a wrong turn along the way: the same tech that can increase intelligence could just as easily be warped to create a population of mind-numbed biological robots. . .

56 The cheery articles are being held for when this administration and it's supporters are hoisted on petards and ridiculed for all to see.

57 We'll simply wind up with a smaller and smaller productive class, making stuff for everyone else to use. Governments will put their heads together and decide to print money, so everyone can acquire said products. It'll be worth X because they say it is and nobody contradicts them. There will be an underground, black market economy, where you get to pay what things are actually worth. Eventually, a leader will unite the left side of the curve against the right side-- who will have considerable influence, because they'll be the ones who make things go. There will be a horribly violent revolution, after which the Triumphant Masses will eat each other. The dust will settle... ...And it'll start all over.

58 Dumbest. &$#@(*$. Plot Point. Ever.

No, that would be the whole "reset" thing.

Think about what the old guy told Neo.  It was going to be the 7th (?) iteration of the Matrix whereby the One chooses to save the code and select 14 men and women to start the next round of human civilization.  Everything is supposed to reset again, yet the humans are still flying around in those hoverships made in 2069.  That means, there's a store of hoverships somewhere the humans are using each time the whole thing collapses and resets. 

Where are they getting them from?

Each time, Zion is destroyed and then rebuilt with each successive reset.  Why do the machines bother trying to find them?  They know where Zion is.  Why can't they just home in on the same place each time instead of pretending to go look for them?

Everything about that story arc falls apart with the 2nd and 3rd movie.

59

A fundamental problem here is that this issue, as so many, is convolved with race, and that will largely preclude any meaningful attempt to address the problem. Any disparity between the normal distribution of the population as a whole with that of any given subpopulation will be (and is now) taken as prima facie evidence of discrimination, and a call to arms to "fix the problem."

Yet it may be that there is no solution. Some ethnicities are on average shorter than others, for example. There is no reason to presuppose that the normal distribution of a subpopulation should exactly track that of the population as a whole.

60 Posted by: salgak at May 04, 2013 12:16 PM (ShrCV) Soylent dreams.

61 What he said. ^^^^

62 We're just going to have to reconcile the fact that a good % of the population is useless. That's happening already as can be seen by the rise of food stamp and disability. Sure a lot of that is fraud, but a lot of it is real as well. There are tens of millions of adults in this country that will never work because there is nothing for them to do.

63 Monty talks like a fag and his shit's all retarded.

64 The won't. Stupid is universal They do actually. And the results are about what you'd expect.

65 the same tech that can increase intelligence could just as easily be warped to create a population of mind-numbed biological robots. . . Go on.

66 OT, but,This is cheery!  Funeral home can't find a cemetary to bury speedbump.   There has to be a lot of people waiting in line to piss on his grave.

67 I teach in a public high school. I can bear witness to the fact that our young people have no motivation, no ambition, and no sense of self worth. I recently assigned research papers for my senior class, and I actually had to explain to one of my students that a copy of a wikipedia page is NOT a research paper. Weep for the future!

68 Well, I think the Dems have figured it out. Their model for society is this: at the bottom, the idle and unemployable dolts who depend on government handouts and dutifully vote Dem in return, and at the top, the new aristocrats who make their home in Washington DC. And in the middle - well, that's where you find the doctors, businessmen, engineers, etc - the productive ones who are not in the elite (although some of them are under the illusion that they are). These are the people who essentially support the other two classes while being despised and hated by both. The tricky thing for the Dems is - how to ensure that the people in the middle quietly continue to play the bills while serving as whipping boys at the same time? They have relied on the law-abiding nature of the middle classes. They fear the Tea Party because it's a sign that the docile taxpayers who keep the whole enterprise running are getting fed up.

69 We'll simply wind up with a smaller and smaller productive class, making stuff for everyone else to use. Governments will put their heads together and decide to print money, so everyone can acquire said products. It'll be worth X because they say it is and nobody contradicts them.

There will be an underground, black market economy, where you get to pay what things are actually worth. Eventually, a leader will unite the left side of the curve against the right side-- who will have considerable influence, because they'll be the ones who make things go.

There will be a horribly violent revolution, after which the Triumphant Masses will eat each other. The dust will settle...

...And it'll start all over.

And then Atlas will Shrug.

70 I doubt if racial clusters on the low end of the graph have to do with "inferiority" as much as certain communities getting shafted with democong policies and propaganda;  nothing like a built-in welfare-voting plantation when you want graft.

It's pretty much human nature to be a shiftless bastard when you're trained to be that way.

71

There should be no discussion of burial. Burn and flush.

 

Repeat with his brother after trial.

72 Everything about that story arc falls apart with the 2nd and 3rd movie.

Posted by: EC at May 04, 2013 12:17 PM (doBIb)

Maybe. But don't my new tits look fabulous?!

73 Has anyone thought of using them as batteries to power our machines?

***

Although it was received as a joke, I was totally serious (several years ago) when I suggested making the chronically unemployed, welfare and food-stamp recipients generate electricity by walking in a giant hamster wheel.  Make them earn their free stuff.

74 Conservatives recognize and address the problem (or attempt to) based on what it is.  Liberals just bleat, moan, and blame conservatives, and then raise taxes.

75 Everything about that story arc falls apart with the 2nd and 3rd movie. I never watched the sequels. The first one left me bored and irritated.

76 Sure a lot of that is fraud, There's an argument to be made that anyone willing to do that is of minimal use to a society, but that's a more simply dealt with issue...

77 It'd be interesting to match n compare curves from intranational, international and regions of the world perspectives.

78 Moo Moo...   there are a lot of folks on disability too that wouldn't have qualified years ago.  The government purposely has loosened the standards over the years to permit more and more to receive bennies.   Just as they keep adjusting what constitutes "poor".  The Democrats want as many people on these programs as possible.

79 It's coming. Trust me on that ***** I design and build industrial robots and even the tip of the top scientists in this field don't believe that. What they are working on though are chimeras that will require fewer humans for oversight and implementation. The goal of the wealthiest of the wealthy is to have replaceable human parts within a couple more generations and to soft kill the masses. Through genetic engineering they plan to breed three set of workers, one smart and technically capable but with a limited life span, a sexless drone for working the farms and domestic duties and a beautiful breed of sex slaves. They have already advanced a long way towards cloning themselves so they will be there in the future and have paradise for themselves. If you think I'm pulling your leg...you're wrong.

80 #67 We home school our boys 13 & 16. They and others like them are the hope for our country, not the dregs you describe.

81 Reality is racist.

82 They fear the Tea Party because it's a sign that the docile taxpayers who keep the whole enterprise running are getting fed up.

Posted by: Donna V. at May 04, 2013 12:19 PM (R3gO3)  

Exactly! 

83 Lemurs stole my ampersand.

84 Excellent Monty. I have been thinking a lot about this, I had been pitching an investment fund that would address the problems you discuss. I have not had any traction to date. In my opinion the problem is not being addressed politically because it would require politicians of any party to speak very uncomfortable truths, the first of which is that Bell curve, but also including the reality that those manufacturing jobs are gone and are never, ever coming back. one approach is to get equity investments into startup lifestyle businesses. They tend to hire more low skilled workers, they tend to be positions which are not easily out-sourced, and those small company business owners often will cut off their left nut before laying off one of "their" people. Loans only go to established businesses, and VC/angel equity investments only go to businesses that are exponential growth type companies, not life-style businesses. One way to help this low skill employment problem is to make it profitable to equity invest into those lifestyle company founders. Email me Monty and I'll send you the deck.

85 And weasels ripped my flesh.

86 I never watched the sequels. The first one left me bored and irritated.


Well, you saved yourself a lot of headache.  I thought the first one was great.

87 Jerry @13 - All that would do is push the mean slightly to the right.

88 Our wimin wont have to work anymore at cleaning the oven but someone's gots to make me a sammich.

89

Just as they keep adjusting what constitutes "poor".

 

This is a pet peeve. The Dems define "poor" as the bottom N% of the income distribution, then want taxes and programs to "help the poor." Yet of course if you define "poor" in this fashion, there will always be a bottom N%. Rinse, lather, repeat.

90 And it aint going to be no damn robot.

91 And itaint going to be no damn robot.


What if it's a robot wimmin?

92 This is why you all need robot insurance from Old Glory.

93

Like I said earlier:

 

"All robots should have a easily accessible kill switch and not be able to turn themselves on."

94 Re-read "The Marching Morons...."

95 What Monty is kinda getting at is a purple wage scenario (originally from the sci-fi novel Riders of the Purple Wage), where the few productive class can get filthy rich, and then everyone else is given the "purple wage" and allowed to "find themselves" or what not. I do not buy these types of arguments. When the industrial revolution came, most something like 90% of the people were in agriculture, and afterward only a few percent. The industrial revolution multiplied the ability of a single person to create value. But instead of fewer people producing the same amount, you had the same number of people producing much more in toto. That situation that was faced was not too dissimilar from the situation we face today. Even with below-average intelligence, a worker can still produce value. This would only arise, though, if people had to work: Technology would be shaped to take advantage of these worked labor; but if everyone is on the dole, then the technology is shaped to do without them. And that is the reasoning behind the far left's desire to cull the human population.

96

That reminds me its "International Clitoris Awareness Week"

 

Tell all your friends!

 

 

97 Back when I was at Large Corporation, Incorporated, we hired an outside consultant to come in and do a skills assessment of our workforce. Their conclusion was that about a third of our workforce was incapable of any kind of productive labor in our non-manual-labor industry. My reaction was, "Only a third?"

98 And itaint going to be no damn robot. Is itaint like etaint? Some kind of online pron?

99 I don't think one does "solve this problem." Isn't that implicitly thinking like a progressive, this idea that the solution to social problems comes from a central plan?

I think the only role for problem solvers is to figure out every possible way that to get the "problem solvers" in the government the hell out of the way, so that the powerful distributed ingenuity of the marketplace can be properly brought to bear. That is the best tool we have, not the minds in our think tanks.

Cognitive skills have become more valuable, yes, but I don't see guys who know how to make things in a machine shop, or skilled plumbers, or skilled electricians, starving. Why most of these guys don't have an apprentice, scooping up their knowledge, is beyond me, but I'd bet you'd see a lot more of it if you declared tomorrow that such things were entirely free from all regulations and price controls.

100 I see two currencies developing, a governement issued instrument for basic transactions, and another more esoteric store of value ( be it capital, options and fiat, ip, raw commodities, real estate, ammunition, etc) that is traded for ownership of real property, the virtue of politicians, and control of corporations. The churn of the underclass, meat, economy means less and less these days.

101 It's a floor wax.
It's a dessert topping.
It's a floor wax!
It's a dessert topping!
It's a floor wax!!
It's a dessert topping, you meercat!!

-Classic skit from SNL (Saturday Night Lemur, of course)

102 sorry cant tipe or spel rite. I cant even get a damn ampersand.

103 103 Poke your left eye and type R...like this, &

104 What Monty is kinda getting at is a purple wage scenario (originally from the sci-fi novel Riders of the Purple Wage), where the few productive class can get filthy rich, and then everyone else is given the "purple wage" and allowed to "find themselves" or what not. All hail Chairman Roddenberry. And his biggest lunacy was that we would all develop into a bunch of scientists and college professors rather than a debased culture of hedonism and waste.

105 58 Everything about that story arc falls apart with the 2nd and 3rd movie.

Even the first movie, amazing as it is, has its holes. We are asked to believe:

Morpheus is a really smart and capable guy

Within a single phone conversation, Morpheus says two things to Neo:

"This line may be tapped"

"They don't know how important you really are"

Gee, dumbass, you think they know now?

106

I'm apologize for the length of this comment but I can't explain it fewer words. I've witnessed this process first hand as an expert in my own limited technical field.

I worked for the phone company. I became an expert in DMS100/200 TOPS translations. I was a union tech for many years and then I got promoted to management as second tier support for routing, trunking, and codes. In other words, when you pick up a landline phone and dial a number, I made that happen. I built the trunk group. I opened the code. I made sure it routed where it was supposed to go. And I shot the troubles when we screwed something up.

In 2004 the whole "everybody gets a trophy" mentality came to upper management at Verizon. They revamped the recognition system so that it went from the "go to people" being the top ranked, meaning intelligence and expertize and experience, to a "what have you done for me lately" system. My boss told me it wasn't "fair" that the same people were always the top ranked every year and whenever the "go to people" were brought up in upper management meetings they were laughed out of the room.

This demoralized everybody. Not just us top ranked people. We knew the job and could do every aspect of it. Hell, we were the ones who wrote the job aids and trained others. So, yeah, I hated sitting there opening codes, but I could it. But the people who were really hurt by the policy were the  middle rung people. The worker bees. They made the place run. They did the drudge work and were perfectly happy doing it. They had no responsibility. But they churned out a lot of work. So they freed up those of us with the talent and intelligence and ambition to develop new ideas and new processes to make all our jobs easier.

When they changed the ranking system all that broke down. Everybody was equal. So I was miserable doing drudge work while the person who was perfectly happy doing drudge work was miserable because they couldn't shoot a trouble. They ended up being the first to be laid off.

The funny thing is that I'm all those people. When I was young and ambitious and hungry I was a top person. After 30 years and the new IP and softswitch technology came out I was perfectly happy to let the youngun's carry on and learn it. I would have been just fine doing the old stuff that I knew. But I eventually walked away from all of it. I'd rather work at Walmart.

 

 

107 67 I teach in a public high school. I can bear witness to the fact that our young people have no motivation, no ambition, and no sense of self worth. I recently assigned research papers for my senior class, and I actually had to explain to one of my students that a copy of a wikipedia page is NOT a research paper. Weep for the future! 

Posted by: Jmel at May 04, 2013 12:19 PM (9tSXa)

 

There probably is some truth in your comment, Jmel.  However, with the shit I see being taught in public schools today I can't help but think that his teachers from K-11 didn't drop the ball as to why he doesn't know how to do a research paper in 12th grade.

 

108 The result will be a war so brutal and bloody so as to prompt the world to beat swords into ploughshares.

109 It's because we have retooled our economy.  By legislation, such as taxes or labor law for example, from being an economy that produces its own natural resources and basic items to an economy that consumes whats others in the world produce. 

Our education system has shifted also from teaching a skill set for educating productive people to teaching a skill set geared more to ego-stroking self-fulfillment and barely good enough for the workers to ask "Do you want fries with that?"

110 Soma!  Soma!  Soma!

111 Within a single phone conversation, Morpheus says two things to Neo:

"This line may be tapped"

"They don't know how important you really are"

Gee, dumbass, you think they know now?

Posted by: Splunge at May 04, 2013 12:35 PM (bKA83)

Well, they weren't interested in Neo, they wanted Morpheus.  That's why they put that tracker on him, to lead them to Morpheus.

112 Lots of 'Tards living kick-ass lives.

113

That wasn't pretty. Not sure what happened to line spacing.

114

A modest proposal: we eliminate all those warnings against things that should be obvious to any higher primate, and let nature take its course.

 

For example, windshield sunscreens gravely admonish users not to drive with the sunscreen covering the windshield. I say that if you don't perceive the problem with driving with the windshield occluded, by all means go ahead and do so. Just do it where there's no one else.

115 Cognitive ability ain't all it's cracked up to be.

116 Spot on Monty.

117 I read all that. I think people on the whole are dumber, including myself. Lots of useless college degrees when people should go to fracking school in North Dakota or something. Welding. Plumbing.

118 What we need is a return to the "tread wheel" of olde. Healthy exercise and productive labor at the same time. People of different abilities could be assigned to wheels operating at different speeds or loads.

119 http://www.workers.org/2013/05/02/nyc-teachers-students-say-testing-unfair/

It's simple.  Do away with all testing and evaluations in school and then nobody will be able to determine who the dumb ones are.

The white man stacks the system with prep schools, anyway.

120 100 Government can't solve the problem, but if you can figure out a way to make a ton of money that as a secondary effect solves the problem we would all be better off. Either we find jobs for those folks and they pull along with us, or we don't, and they just vote that we pull a little harder.

121

All robot wimin should have a easily accessible kill switch and not be able to turn themselves on.

 

Don't forget it's ICAW!

122 Love your posts.

123 For morons with ESPNU: Great lacrosse game on now. "Big East" Championship Villanova Fighting Standard Deviations vs Syracuse Orange Gaussian Distributions Check it out.

124 Seriously though, there are lots of things for the left side of the curve folks to do that are service oriented. There is no end to the 'services' one can do for others.  If the basic requirements of living get cheap enough (and they already are, if you lower your needs but not your happiness) you can still be a player in the value-for-value marketplace.

This is not easy to implement, of course, but it is not impossible. Well, it is if Progressives are in charge. They have to go, of course.

125 And Monty's post helps explain why many people vote Dem even if they're not on welfare and are not social libs. A Dem relative of mine, an Occupational Therapist, is an example. He thought going into healthcare was a ticket to security. His hours have just been cut. A robot might very well replace him before he's anywhere near retirement age. He's always worked, never been on welfare, but he fears he will be at some point. All he can think of when he votes is keeping that safety net there for himself and his family, although that safety net is now on the point of tearing. When people like him say, "The GOP doesn't care about the poor" what they're really saying (and fearing) is the prospect of losing everything and ending up on a park bench.

126 Surplus dullards will be given make work jobs at the TSA.

127

Go watch an excellent 10 minute short Sci- Fi movie "Blinky" on Youtube. It's about a robot and  a boy,  the production values are very good. A heartwarming story with a feel good ending.

128

The worker bees. They made the place run. They did the drudge work and were perfectly happy doing it. They had no responsibility. But they churned out a lot of work.

 

When I first moved from academia to industry I was astonished to find how many people were perfectly happy doing repetitive drudge work, in part because (they said) they knew what they'd be doing on any given day, because that's what they did every day. I'd be throwing a rope over a rafter in that situation, but apparently they'd have been doing so in a managment position.

129 I am developing a control system with Gaussian models to tell when equipment adjustments are required. The funny this is, I am taking and extremely complex system and making it simple.

What does this have to do with brewing? Nothing. Headed for the brew store now. Will read the movie review later. Looks interesting.

130

There is no end to the 'services' one can do for others

 

 

I for one welcome the arrival of Cootertown.

 

 

As long as I get to be Masterblaster.

131 In a sense, a forklift is a robot, but one with a human processor. And in some fighter jets, the pilot is just one of the voting members on board determining where the jet is going to go. And I think these are the answers. Make the automation reliant on a human for activation, but with enough safety interlocks so the human doesn't do anything stupid (which you would have to have for the entirely automated machine anyway). Don't go for the highest level of automation possible. This is what I think airliners should be doing anyway, vevause I think it as been shown too much automation is bad--the pilot needs to stay involved. We need our employers to "dumb down" their machines while still staying econmically efficient. I think the answer involves do we want welfare via business employment (with possibilities of firing for bad behavior) or welfare via a straight dole, with no pssibilities for firing, and all still paid for by businesses anyway, via taxes? If dole, change nothing. If business employment, direct a one for one tax credit for wages paid for a job that could have entirely by automation but is done where a "dumb human" tells the automation where to go (and the automation ensures the human does not screw up). There are some other things needed (mainly cultural) to make it work and nit build up a class of people thinking they were essential when they were really replaceable, and which time prevents me from delving into, but it could be done. In the beginning minutes of Star Trek II, I always wondered about the guy vacuuming at Starfleet HQ. Was he retarded? Or just average? That's the kind of thing to think about--how to give meanigful dignity to normal folks without making it seem patronizing condescension from the Braniac Master Race class. You know, the Progressives.

132 In 20-30 years we'll be able to select higher-IQ embryos for implantation. If not sooner. That will mainly widen the gulf between the cognitive elite and the peasantry. Until then we'll just move farther down the Idiocracy curve. The dumbest people in America have the most kids. There already are societies where there a cognitive elite minority. South Africa and Malaysia are examples. In those societies the cognitive elite are able to live much better lives, despite rampant govt discrimination against them and the occasional murder-riot-rampages where the peasants enact some revenge.

133 I don't know. I've worried about this also, but have a few questions. Germany has just over 5 percent unemployment, Switzerland and the Scandinavians are doing pretty well, I believe. What are their citizens doing for a living? I think that bottom third on the bell curve may be more capable than we give them credit for, especially if they have incentives to perform. Just looking around the country, there seems to be quite a bit of manual work that needs doing, for example, just maintaining and repairing buildings and infrastructure. Finally, does life have to be that expensive? What makes life horrible is lack of public safety and decent civil society, not the size of your home. My retirement plan is to live in a trailer in some decent place....

134 Lemurs stole my ampersand. Posted by: Freak Out! at May 04, 2013 12:24 PM (jmVS/) Heh. I'll have to remember that one...

135 Retread, unless the pilots are flying an Airbus and get outvoted by the computers.

136 Tell 'em I can hoist a jack, and I can lay a track I can pick and shovel too, ain't no machine can. That's been proved to you.

137 Is that. Gaussian distribution in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

138 I think we have lost the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.  Throughout history, we have seen society and the workforce change as technology changes, yet somehow, we have moved ahead.  I believe we are approaching a point where people have become so dependent on someone else providing answers that they cannot come up with their own.


How did this happen?  To an extent, we have taught ourselves to do it.  Parents have shifted more and more responsibility off the shoulders of their children.  Things that we (I am 52) were expected to do for ourselves, they now do for their children.  Want a college scholarship but need to write an essay?  Dad will do it.  Have a kid as a teenager?  Don't worry yourself; mom will raise it.  Kids never face tough times or adversity.  They don't know how to adapt.


Schools are no better.  Students don't want to learn; they want to be given answers.  I've seen kids at the top of a class melt down while working on a project and they ran up on a problem that they couldn't immediately solve.  This particular course is designed to place the responsibility for learning on the student.  The teacher isn't supposed to help them.  Without someone to tell them the answers, they quit on the project.  They've lost the ability to adapt.


The example I always use is a man who lives here in our little town.  He is the guy you go to for lunch.  When you want an informal event catered, you call him.  You need lots of barbeque, you order from him.  He's been in business at the same location over 50 years.  He didn't start out cooking.  Fifty+ years ago, he and his wife opened a neighborhood grocery store and did well.  When the big chain grocery stores started moving in, he started losing business.  He decided to start serving sandwiches at lunch to bring in some extra money.  He decided to cook some meat and offer plate lunches.  Over time, the demand increased for his food. He added tables and catering.  A funny thing happened.  When people came in for a plate, they went ahead and grabbed some bread and milk while they were there.  He's still going strong because he didn't give up.  He found a way to adapt.


I think fewer people can do this any more.  The government has replaced their parents.  The government takes care of their problems.  Need money?  Here's a check!  Don't have a cell phone?  Here you go!  Can't afford your house?  We'll take care of it!  Instead of finding ways to solve problems, we have begun to rely on others to solve them.  Automation is only one factor.  There are much larger issues causing these problems.

139 It's also hard to solve a problem people won't admit exists. The ruling class won't admit that IQ exists, that it's primarily genetic, mostly fixed from a very young age, and there are large group differences among human ethnic groups.

140 We'll achieve our utopian ideal even if we have to rob, rape, and kill every motherfucking menshevik to get there.

141 >What if certain races predominate along the left side of the bell curve, certain races predominate along the right side of the bell curve, and certain races are more equally distributed?

>What then?

What then? Then you ignore that data and call Charles Murray a racist.

142 Yeah, no offense but one of the problems our modern society has is word spillage.  Lots of words, when few will do.

You don't know the answer?  Then what was all that stuff in  the middle I didn't read? 

143 All your Blockbuster jobs are belong to us.

144 Genius level people, oddly, especially if unaware of this, are more susceptible to cons than central tendency people. The idiot professor is a real thing, as we knew.

145 This is the huge problem with illegal immigration and amnesty. We have permitted tens(?) of millions of "strong-back" low education illegals to enter the country taking the diminishing jobs from our own leftside of the curve workers. It's the stupidest situation possible and McCain/Rubio/Graham plan to make it worse.

146 Polli are you on Ravelry?

147

#129 Jay Guevara at May 04, 2013 12:42 PM

I can't express how valuable these people were to our department. Yeah they needed detailed job aids and training, but once they got it down they really produced so much work and that freed up us top performers to do what we did. Because we were free from the daily drudge we had the time to experiment and test things. One of my co-workers wrote a PERL program to open codes automatically. Then he trained another worker on how to run it. In more than a hundred end offices. And she was perfectly happy doing it. She ended up getting laid off, too.

148 For 101, add tax credits

149 The "equality" worshipers appear to be doomed...

150 Chicoms are doing the best IQ-gene studies and will soon succeed in identifying most of the IQ-boosting genes. It's a multi-genic trait. So there will be dozens, hundreds, of genes that each provides a small boost. And dozens, hundreds that have a small deleterious effect on IQ. In the future, the avg couple will be able to easily screen for an embryo that is 5-10 IQ points smarter than they are. Singapore will be the first society to do the en masse. Mid to late 21st century Singapore will be the first society in human history with an average IQ 115+.

151 There'll always be a place for life-artists.

152 I have to wonder how much of the 'education' dilemma is really the result of the almost total collapse of our educational system? We can't gloss over that. The main reason so many jobs require college degrees now is that a high school diploma doesn't even guarantee that someone knows how to read or write. If the education system can be restored to some semblance of sanity, then won't a lot of these unemployable people be provided with the tools to be of value? My wife was in education for many years in a special needs program. This is no joke: Their education goal was to graduate someone who could fill out forms (in other words, apply for benefits).

153 Meh, it's all good.

154 US researchers refuse to do IQ gene studies for fear of discovering what we all know to be true. Chicoms don't have that hang-up since they are all Han. They don't care if they offend the lower IQ ethnic groups. China has an avg IQ of 105. Northeast asians consistently have the highest avg IQs. They also appear to have a lower std deviation.

155 127 Surplus dullards will be given make work jobs at the TSA.
Posted by: TexBob at May 04, 2013 12:41 PM (in4Fg)

Wait--they're not doing that already?

156 Innate intelligence is one factor, but so is work ethic and experience. Those two things can move someone rightward on the curve, but what we've been doing over the last 50 years is take the left-est segments and diminish those two factors so that their movement to a more productive part of the curve is minimized.

157 LIVs, come for rejuvenation....

158 China has an avg IQ of 105. Northeast asians consistently have the highest avg IQs. They also appear to have a lower std deviation. Posted by: Flatbush Joe at May 04, 2013 12:55 PM (ZPrif) Why they are sooo brilliant they forgot to breed. The age bomb is about to go off in China and Japan, so much for the great Chinese threat (much like the fear of Tokyo during the 1980s).

159 Hat - F'n Lemurs

160 And the winner for being totally stupid. Woman and brother write their mother's obituary, they include that the woman has a female life partner. The Catholic school where she was a Phys Ed teacher for 19 years terminates her employment when they read the obituary. Now the school is receiving threats and she wants her job back.

Uh excuse me sweetie. What part of Catholic don't you get? For 19 years you were teaching young girls in gym while living a lie. You were lying to your employer. What kind of example are you? Not a good one.

And before I forget. I wonder how many parents are now asking their daughters where she touched them.

http://tinyurl.com/boy5uh7

161 Just wait until dish-washing is done by robots. It's not that far away. Check out Baxter the robot. http://www.rethinkrobotics.com/index.php/products/baxter/

162 1 This idea of robots that fix themselves is bullshit Posted by: Beto at May 04, 2013 11:58 AM (MhA4j) Spoken with true myopia. They're coming. Not yet, but oh so close. Robotics is exploding as a field.

163 Widespread eugenics by the upper classes will be occurring in all rich countries by mid-century. Eugenics is already practiced now for birth defects like Downs Syndrome. Widespread sex-selection in even poor countries in much of the world.

164 Why they are sooo brilliant they forgot to breed. The age bomb is about to go off in China and Japan, so much for the great Chinese threat (much like the fear of Tokyo during the 1980s). Posted by: CAC at May 04, 2013 12:57 PM (cgX+7) IQ is WAY over-rated in cultural survival. Having a culture of peace, responsibility, and hard work is far more valuable than a few points on the IQ scale.

165 @107 Jaynie59,     I read it all and you are right on the mark there.  That kind of corporate thinking was like a PC virus that went everywhere in the 90's.

166 Third Horseman, the college degree requirement IIRC from other commentators is a scam by business HR departments to protect themselves from lawsuits from the truly less qualified.  That it feeds the diploma mill is just bonus.

167 16 That's also called a Normal distribution. Posted by: EC at May 04, 2013 12:06 PM (doBIb) Nope. Unless IQ is zero-mean

168 The collective IQ of the country is headed south of that of a Lemur's.

169 Having robots do everything for you isn't always advisable.

170 IQ is WAY over-rated in cultural survival. Having a culture of peace, responsibility, and hard work is far more valuable than a few points on the IQ scale. Posted by: HoboJerky, now with 74% more DOOM! at May 04, 2013 01:00 PM (52n2x) Or as Idiocracy pointed out with the "smart" couple that kept putting off children. We're overrun with idiots not because we can't stop the idiots from breeding but because the brains won't pop em out at the same rate.

171 I'm working on a fully automated robotic leaf blower that's going to make me millions. MILLIONS I tells ya!

172 China is still going to dominate the US. They will pass the US in GDP soon. By 2030 China GDP will be more than 2x US GDP. The 2020s are gonna be a shock to Americans as we get passed much quicker than most expect. The avg American is just ignorant of these trends. The China threat has hardly disappeared.

173

>>>And before I forget. I wonder how many parents are now asking their daughters where she touched them.

 

 

Under the monkey bars.

 

174 The China threat has hardly disappeared. Posted by: Flatbush Joe at May 04, 2013 01:03 PM (ZPrif) Look at China's expected demographics in 20 years. They aren't going to send out an army of green greybeards. I'm not worried about 20+ years. I'm worried about the NEXT 20 years.

175 137 Tell 'em I can hoist a jack, and I can lay a track I can pick and shovel too, ain't no machine can. That's been proved to you.
Posted by: John Henry at May 04, 2013 12:45 PM (hpYnL)

Next thing, you'll be telling us that that terrifying sound ain't nothin' but your hammer suckin' wind.

176 Two traits highly correlated with life success are IQ and conscientiousness. IQ is not the only important trait. But it is a very important trait. It can't compensate for being lazy, careless, or immoral of course.

177 The answer to the dearth of low cognitive jobs in this country is to import 30 million more low cognitive people. 

178 China is still going to dominate the US. They will pass the US in GDP soon. By 2030 China GDP will be more than 2x US GDP. The 2020s are gonna be a shock to Americans as we get passed much quicker than most expect. The avg American is just ignorant of these trends. The China threat has hardly disappeared. Posted by: Flatbush Joe at May 04, 2013 01:03 PM (ZPrif) Unless they invent a good 100-200 million new Chinese ready to take over jobs in exactly 18 years, no. Their age problem is why they loosened up the 1 child rule- they NEED more workers to take over, or else the machine slows down.

179 Don't sweat it guys.  I'll take care of the left side of that curve soon enough.

180 I think one thing that get over looked here is the capital cost to the machines.  If your going to bring in machine to replace or offset a worker you have to compare the cost of the worker to the cost of the machine. The machine is never going to be free.  What the government has done is increased the cost of the worker higher (minimum wage laws, excessive regulations etc.)  than is should be and now makes the capital expenditure on the machine more likely.

181 I deal with IQ tests all day. Hint: they're not always objective.

182 PRC is getting frisky now with approximately 25 million military age men who will never find a wife unless they look overseas.  They and India are trading barbs because a PRC PLA unit has invaded land India claims.  Then there is the matter of the PRC PLAN roving the South China Sea claiming all of it including the Spratly Islands and shaking down the ships of Vietnam and Philippines.

183 I'm well aware of China's demographics. I'm not saying they will invade the world. I'm saying China will be, by far, the richest most powerful country in the world after 2030. And the transition will happen quicker than Americans expect. Americans are being told the China threat will fade like Japan. We have 2.5x the population of Japan. China has 4x the population of the US.

184 163 And the winner for being totally stupid. Woman and brother write their mother's obituary, they include that the woman has a female life partner. The Catholic school where she was a Phys Ed teacher for 19 years terminates her employment when they read the obituary. Now the school is receiving threats and she wants her job back.

Uh excuse me sweetie. What part of Catholic don't you get? For 19 years you were teaching young girls in gym while living a lie. You were lying to your employer. What kind of example are you? Not a good one.

And before I forget. I wonder how many parents are now asking their daughters where she touched them.

http://tinyurl.com/boy5uh7

Posted by: Anna Puma (+SmuD) at May 04, 2013 12:58 PM (tsPRH)

 

Well she was a Phys Ed teacher.  I'm sure most of the girls were aware that she was a lesbian. 

185 http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/05/chinas-population-poised-to-crash-in.html China will *NOT* be a hyper-power, unless they do pre-emptive war with the west.

186 In my career in ATC, I've seen it go from PC frenzy while the HQ and tech folks were trying to figure out a way to get rid of the human element.  They were just sure that the high wash-out rate was fixable, that it wasn't what seemed true, that only a select number of people had the cognitive ability, the mindset, to be good controllers.

So they worked and worked over the years with this program and that to boost numbers and relax standards to achieve a less exclusive mix, and too all the while, in Virgina in a wonk shop working on how to automate the entire thing.  That is their ultimate goal.  There are airline wonks that want the same.  Automated cockpits data-linked to automated ATC with a human sitting there watching. 

They'd rather obviously automate the entire enterprise but people alive today wouldn't trust a system like that.  maybe in 100 years.

187 US is 2x nominal GDP of China today. In PPP terms China has almost caught up.

188 Flatbush Joe, all I seem to be hearing from you in this thread is "IQ Uber Alles."  Nicht gut mein komerad.

189

The future IS Idiocracy. How long we can hold it off is the question.

190 "The Census Bureau predicts that ChinaÂ’s population will peak in 2026, just 14 years from now. Its labor force will shrink, and its over-65 population will more than double over the next 20 years, from 115 million to 240 million. It will age very rapidly. Only Japan has aged faster -- and Japan had the great advantage of growing rich before it grew old. By 2030, China will have a slightly higher proportion of the population that is elderly than western Europe does today -- and western Europe, recall, has a higher median age than Florida. "

191 Our economy is in trouble because government and big business ways of hiring have created road blocks to those who, for what ever reason, are un-credentialed to make there way in the world.

Smart doesn't necessarily mean that one has a degree. And having a degree doesn't necessarily make one smart.

Too many blocks by HR departments and protocols to those without credentials and too many laws restricting those who who think out side the box or are willing to work in ways others don't, won't or didn't know could make them money.

We've become Britain of the early 20th century. And we're undergoing the same shrinkage and loss of power that they did.

WWII just finished them off. They were in decline before then.

The major reasons were over-regulation and the attitude by their businesses and business leaders that they had the only answers and those who thought they had other answers were fined and regulated out of business.

Top that off with an arrogance a mile thick and then the lack of response and in many cases the outright hostility to those who saw/reported the things that THEY  could see were wrong and you have British production failures that abounded during the '40's and '50's.

There isn't any way out folks. we're on the slide and there is no way to stop other than outright rebellion and a coup d'etat that would remove all business and labor restrictions. Since that AIN'T gonna happen, we'll just have to enjoy the slide into poverty and irrelevancy in the world.

Space exploration MIGHT be a possible out OR a war. But I don't see either of them as a long term solution.

That's why I sometimes get frustrated with the constant reiteration of our problems; No fixes are given, and there's little that can really realistically be done about our situation.

Not without "drastic measures" being taken.

And that means blood, violence and destruction with little chance of rapid change to the positive.

192 PRC is getting frisky now with approximately 25 million military age men who will never find a wife unless they look overseas. Getting a few million killed in a war, then, is a feature, not a bug.

193 China will be the dominant power in the world. Perhaps not a *hyper* power. The US hyperpower phases were brief periods after WW2, when Europe and Japan destroyed themselves, and briefly after the Cold War when USSR imploded. US is no longer a hyperpower and, most likely, never will be one again.

194

Idiot sock.

195 132 Make the automation reliant on a human for activation, but with enough safety interlocks so the human doesn't do anything stupid (which you would have to have for the entirely automated machine anyway). Don't go for the highest level of automation possible. This is what I think airliners should be doing anyway, vevause I think it as been shown too much automation is bad--the pilot needs to stay involved.

------------

So... in the brave new world, you see us all as George Jetson?

196 Anna, then you haven't read what I wrote very carefully.

197 We will be a proud county of button pushing morons.

198 US is no longer a hyperpower and, most likely, never will be one again. Posted by: Flatbush Joe at May 04, 2013 01:13 PM (ZPrif) Of course. I'm just not threatened by China, economically, anymore than I am today. I'm only worried that they will realize the demographic bomb they are sitting on and freak out.

199 After 2050, US will start catching up to China again due to our population still rising. I actually think this is one major reason why McCain is so pro-amnesty. McCain wants America to be population competitive with China and India. McCain wants 500, 600, 700 million Americans.

200 zsasz, for the past five years unwed males from the PRC have been trolling dating sites in Vietnam for brides.  Does that tell you have bad things are on the marriage front?

201 Monty, great post by the way.

202 Robotics is exploding as a field. Posted by: HoboJerky, now with 74% more DOOM! I know. I design and build them.

203 China also has *zero* cultural sway over the world. That's another hurdle to surpassing the US.

204

This is a great post, and raises many interesting issues.

 

At the same time I find it surprising, in that it says some things that seem to be wildly absurd - that anybody who frequents this place ought to know better. I hope to explore the "good stuff" in a minute, but my main beefs are:

 

 (1) the only new thing going on that made this a jobless and recover-less recession is ObamaCare, and it doesn't a rocket scientist to figure out that if you greatly increase the cost of hiring people, that employers will HAVE to hire less, ESPECIALLY at the low end, where the added cost represents a much higher percentage of the cost of employing that person. The Baby Boomers retiring (not directly mentioned here) is a significant factor, but it's not the main thing, not by a long shot.

 

(2) It's amazing to me that the author brings up the Luddites, because his central thesis is basically a Luddite one.  Even more aggravating is how I remember Obama blaming ATMs, in part for unemployment, putting tellers out of work.  When you're saying the same thing as Obama, regarding anything having to do with economics - well, I'm sorry, but you need to take a deep breath look in the mirror, and spend a few days rethinking some of your basic premises. I could give an actual argument (and maybe will), but do I really NEED TO!?!  C'mon - it's an argument to live like the Amish!

 

205 Thank you for explaining to me why I've been buying all these firearms. I wish I were kidding.

206 193 -

Aha!  I've got the solution for poor old China!

Two words: Muslim immigration!!

It's working in Europe as we speak. 

207

Beto -

 

Dont forget the kill switch.

208 I don't think you can be right. Else how do you explain Pelosi, Reid, Obama, et al?

209 How many nukes does China have? What kind? Seems like nobody cares.

210 I know. I design and build them. Posted by: Beto at May 04, 2013 01:15 PM (MhA4j) Figures. Rule #4,563 at the HQ: if you insinuate ignorance of a poster at the HQ, they will actually be in the field.

211 IQ isn't the all-important trait. But it's very important. See IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Avg IQ of a nation is highly predictive of living standards. North Korea is a great example of how horrible policies can impoverish even a population with a high avg IQ.

212 "Until they come up with a machine that can automatically update Java, Quicktime and Flash via Group Policy, I'm pretty safe."

(MS Powershell, perl & WMIC scripts)

213 212 How many nukes does China have? What kind? Seems like nobody cares. Posted by: Beagle at May 04, 2013 01:17 PM (sOtz/) MAD. The atom bomb was God's greatest gift to mankind in the 20th century. All these warring nations suddenly broke out the peace signs.

214 Beto - Dont forget the kill switch. Posted by: Freak Out! at May 04, 2013 01:16 PM That's called, "The Installation Department"

215 208 -

That's only phase I.   Phase II:  breed.

You need more hands on deck to use said firearms. 

216

"205 Robotics is exploding as a field.
Posted by: HoboJerky, now with 74% more DOOM!

I know. I design and build them."

 

 

I have always found it fascinating, studied control systems in college (especially optimal control), and am pretty good with software, if I say, myself. Any ideas how an "old" guy could get involved in that stuff?

 

217 Well, the gubbermint already has a program in place to take care of some of this. It's called Obamacare.

You see, when the lower rung gets sick, have no doubt that they will be subject to Death Panels, and will get the short straw. So, over time, the left side of the curve will gradually be diminished.

It's sort of like ... what's the word... "eugenics." Yeah, that's it.

And if anyone brings that up, well, we'll just say we have to do it for Mother Earth, Overpopulation, your death is a Green Solution!

218

Ok I get it about the IQ. It was used a a figure of speech.

 

What I meant is we are becoing a notion of dumbasses.

 

219

Question: 

Any reason I should be hesitant to buy E-mycin at the pet shop to treat my inner ear infection?

220 Flatbush Joe, perhaps I have missed something.  All I keep seeing in your posts about superior IQ people doing well no matter what are the words of Margaret Sanger and Eugenics.

Beagle you mean all the missiles the PRC has buried in tunnels that are mobile and perhaps even have stolen US nuclear warhead designs?

221 215 Ugh.  Wrote "Perl AND WMIC".  Don't know why it came out wrong.

222 Honestly, this is just rehashing Obama's rightfully mocked ATM lament. Technological advances create much more opportunity than they destroy.

223 Nation. Dumbass.

224 Cogswell!  You're FIRED!

225 Singapore will be the first society to do the en masse. Mid to late 21st century Singapore will be the first society in human history with an average IQ 115+.

The problem with that was well stated by the delightfully subversive The Incredibles: if everyone is special, nobody is.

In that particular case, you will then have 115+ IQ people doing welding and mopping restrooms, and probably a lot unhappier about it than someone further down the bell curve would be.  This is sort of a microcosm of the "everyone must go to college" mania that took over the West post-WW2.  No, everyone must not.

226 Also, the problem of what to do with the lesser endowed is one of the reason for the evolution of government care.

They are already killing people in Britain that don't have a future.

It's only a few steps from that basic decision to the euthanizing, whether by active neglect or passive neglect, of those who have little future but years of life left.

"Managed Care" always was about balancing the costs to maintain a life compared with the rewards of doing so.

More and more people are estranged from their family. Old to young, young to old.

It doesn't take much imagination to believe that when faced with an older person who doesn't have any relatives to consider becomes neglected to the point where they die sooner than otherwise.

And that's a slippery slope that the world is already ON.

It's all on where you draw the line. And believe me, those with college degrees and money WON'T be the ones who are chosen to "lessen the load" first.

227 I think it's odd that people are discussing "average IQ."  Average is average, no matter where you put the mean in a normal distribution. 

As everyone SHOULD know anyway, the tests are, and always have been notoriously unreliable for measuring anything other than a certain, specific type of learning ability. 

Intelligence  was never necessarily the same thing. 

228

What's the big deal? Stalin had all this figured out years ago. The Soviet Union had zero unemployment and millions of people building all sorts of things. Read part 3 chapter 22 "We are building" of "The Gulag Archipelago". Hail Socialism. Hail Progressivism. Hail the Vanguard Doctrine.

229 By "lesser endowed" do you mean hung like a Lemur?

230 214 IQ isn't the all-important trait. But it's very important. See IQ and the Wealth of Nations. Avg IQ of a nation is highly predictive of living standards.
xxx

Another word of the day: consanguinity. It explains the constant warring in the Middle East, as well as the insanity that is Islam. It's what happens when whole nations are settled on the wrong side of the bell curve.

231 Get rid of government funded welfare of all kinds and the problem solves itself.

Yes there are many jobs that require a high degree of intelligence, but many more jobs require the ability to do different things over the course of the day or just plain social skills - two things automation is poor at.

The real problem we have is that welfare programs make these jobs unappealing to the dependent class since they can make more money not working. Remove this requirement and suddenly people will start taking these jobs again, and even find markets that right now do no exist because of the government.

Yes, this means that there will be "income inequality". This is a good thing. Having a real difference in your quality of life depending on the difficulty of the job you take is a good thing for society. We want people to strive to provide more value for society not sit on their asses and vote D every 4 years.

232 225 Honestly, this is just rehashing Obama's rightfully mocked ATM lament. Technological advances create much more opportunity than they destroy. Posted by: Lauren at May 04, 2013 01:20 PM (wsGWu) That isn't clear at all, as far as the types of jobs that replace it. If you imagine the old economy like a uniform distribution, we are now looking at a U-shaped distribution in job salaries due to technology. It could be getting worse.

233 English as a universal language is a huge advantage we have, I agree. That is a force-multiplier in cultural power. And after 2050 the US will start catching up to China in population and GDP. Post 2050, India's power will start to increase dramatically. India really needs to try and solve their chronic malnutrition. Avg IQ in India is very low, but a significant amount appears to be due to malnutrition and childhood disease. The disease part will be harder to eliminate than the lack of calories. Africa has the same tropical disease problem. Singapore is able to overcome the disease problem, despite their location.

234 I read about some dam construction in China about 20 years ago. Thousands of peasants were moving earth w/picks, shovels, baskets and wheelbarrows. The foreign engineers/consultants suggested the work could be done much faster w/ eartmoving equipment but the Chinese refused....so they could have something for those thousands of peasants to do.

235 @216 Proxy wars and funding unrest are not quite peace.

236 how an "old" guy could get involved in that stuff? Posted by: Optimizer at May 04, 2013 01:18 PM Look into companies that do industrial testing. Especially RF system testing. Almost everything we build now goes to Japan, China or India.

237 The foreign engineers/consultants suggested the work could be done much faster w/ eartmoving equipment but the Chinese refused....so they could have something for those thousands of peasants to do.

Don't worry, we took notes.

238 What kind of kewpie doll does China win if/when it's GDP surpasses that of the US?

239 Proxy wars and funding unrest are not quite peace. Posted by: Beagle at May 04, 2013 01:22 PM (sOtz/) They aren't killing(other country's) people by the millions anymore. Compare pre-bomb to post-bomb 20th century. Yeah.

240 Interesting discussion, but what does it have to do with my free contraceptives?

241 Nom, nom, nom.

Posted by: Antibiotic-resistant bateria at May 04, 2013 01:24 PM (vbh31)

 

 

Well, I'd rather feed you than a cock-suckin' doctor.

242 Although it pains me to say it, I think the answer is in some form of guaranteed income for stupid people, although it has to come with conditions that prevent a person from reproducing if they are getting the guaranteed income. At least then the problem of lack of work for an individual of low cognitive ability dies with that person.

My job in corporate strategy will be among the last to be automated, since even if my company had an all-robot workforce, I would be one of the people deciding what those robots should do for the company, so I will be one of the people funding the guaranteed income and, while it isn't my preferred solution, it seems to be the only one which is politically feasible and even then, the idea of restricting people's ability to reproduce is a tough sell. I do wish that politicians would talk about this issue of robots and artificial intelligence more and in an honest way, but I realize that is a pipe dream because telling the vast majority of the population that they are less valuable than a machine isn't exactly a popular message.

243 IQ is a real thing. They call it g in the psych literature to avoid political controversy. Most complex human skills are highly g-loaded. It's better to live in a town of smart people than dumb people. Sure, any individual smart person might have other problems and traits that make them useless. But, on average, it's better to be smart than dumb. And it's a lot better to live and work among smart people than dumb people.

244 This whole thing will likely self correct. As we become utterly dependent on technology, when it fails...and it will, on a grand scale, the only ones to survive will be the ones who already live on nothing. Think tribes in Africa.

245 What ever happened to that gay bomb we were developing?  A couple of gigatons of ghey and the Chinese will have been dealt with fabulously.

246 A rare Saturday treat indeed. Monty so good to read you. Thank you for the brain food.

247 249 -

We all have AIDS though, and AIDS treatments rely on technology, so... there goes that theory. 

248 I think the phrase of for us going forward is, lay low, and don't get sick.

249 I do wonder if the coming age of free automatic language translation will lessen our advantage of having English as the universal language. What happens in 2035 when my Google Glass (or some future wearable tech) allows me to talk in real-time with a Chinese person? When I can read all the signs in real-time because my glasses translate all the Chinese into English (and vice-versa for the Chinese of course). There is no need to learn foreign languages. Today I read foreign newspapers all the time in languages I've never studied. Google translate isn't perfect but I get the gist. I get 80%+ of the meaning.

250 219 I have always found it fascinating, studied control systems in college (especially optimal control), and am prettygood with software, if I say, myself. Any ideas how an "old" guy could get involved in that stuff?

You didn't ask me, and I'm no expert, but if I were getting started in this stuff, and wanted to get some things going quickly, I'd at least take a look at Lego. Seriously. There seems to be a lot of cool stuff going on, and I can see how using those blocks would get you past a lot of the physical construction and on to the fun control stuff.

Hacking Roombas seems to be another thing people are playing with.

251 I could see the benefits of hacking a Roomba...  but who could you tell?

252 247 -

You sound like our kind of employee.  Won't you come work for us?

253 "225 Honestly, this is just rehashing Obama's rightfully mocked ATM lament. Technological advances create much more opportunity than they destroy.

Posted by: Lauren at May 04, 2013 01:20 PM (wsGWu)"

Technological advances in the past have been about multiplying human muscles. These advances freed up people to use their brains more and more. Now, the technical advances are aiming to recreate the ability of the brain, at the lower end of the cognitive scale. This will not end up in the same way as previous advances did.

254 All I can tell is of my experience, which might be a microcosm of what has occurred. In the early 80's I started using mini computers in a factory. Learned how to read source code and modify it. Then micro computers came along and -- in addition to my day to day duties -- spent my nights and weekends learning how to program, how to automate the order entry process, how to network the beasts, how to create more of what we needed in house. Our delivery times decreased, our orders increased, our profits soared. The factory floor and the machines were still the same, but the revolution was around the edges of those machines. I thought it would never end, I honestly did. I saw a country which was hitting new heights in prosperity, unemployment for all intents and purposes was zero, as anyone could find a job. Then Bill Clinton and Nancy Pelosi decided to unleash the economic engine of China against the USA. It was as if someone took a knife to the life raft of manufacturing -- a little under one third of our economy at that time -- and the ship began to sink. I've read that 40,000 factories closed in the decade after giving China permanent most favored status, and I believe it. I closed my own, one that a year or two before was very, very profitable. I did not intend to lose everything I spent a lifetime to earn in some wild bet against 1.2 billion Chinese Communists to see who would work for less money. I've also read that Bill Clinton gave an interview in the last year or so and 'blamed Bush' for not watching over what was occurring. I have no answers on how to put the genie back in the bottle. The only point I want to make is that politicians will screw anyone, even one-third of the economy, and we have to be eternally vigilant and loud and angry when they piss on our leg and tell us it's rain.

255 Oh, and to extend my point - it is not unusual to see a local grocery hiring the mentally disabled to bag groceries.

This is not a high value job, but it does generate value. And it puts those doing the job in the same category as everyone else - a productive member of society.

The leftwing take on this seems to be we'd be better off paying someone who could take a more intellectually rigorous job $25/h bagging groceries and abort the mentally disabled.
 
And note, this is what happens eventually in any "egalitarian" society - those who can't meet society's expectations will be forceably removed from it. This is as true of Sparta with its exposure of infants as it is with Obamameria's genocide against those with Down's syndrome.

256 2020s are also when the Reagan naval buildup of the 80s starts to age out of the fleet. We don't have the money to replace all those ships and subs. This will occur at the same time that the Chicom fleet will be making huge leaps in power and capability. In related news it was announced recently that Qinetic -- tha super advance UK miltech R&D firm -- has been completely and totally compromised by Chicom hackers. News reports said pretty much all of the records for every advanced weapons system and research project they were working on were completely and totally compromised. China is catching up fast. In large part by stealing technical and engineering data.

257 @ 234 18-1, Yep. That's the solution. Remove the blocks to job creation and innovation. And- require that people that people be responsible for themselves and their kids. No welfare. But- I think the left has been thinking about this for years and come up with their own solution. Obama's election and policies represent what happens when you decide to loot the future to support yourself and cronies because you've decided it's all going to collapse anyway. But hey, when the economy does collapse, who do you want on top? It's the marginally smart but useless (politicians, wymyn's studies yabbos, etc) using the stupid to steal from the producers. And it worked.

258 @243 No doubt the large nuclear powers have shied away from war. But after what the last two world wars did to say Russia - Soviet Union and France to name two, the memory of large conventional war helped keep peace. The conventional bombing of Japan dwarfed the two nuclear strikes. The nuke helped Japan save face in surrender.

259 Regular Moron, what you said is so true.  I don't think most folks are truly aware of how damaging Clinton's dealings with China were.  He needed/ wanted all that campaign money and China got a lot for their trouble.

Look at all the aerospace tech he allowed to flow over there?  Truly deserving of major, major scorn and rebuke.  ( I know,, kinda harsh, but it's saturday! )

260 just google "China qinetiq" to see the news reports about the hacking. It's a pretty huge deal. Just broke in the last day or two.

261

Posted by: LindaFell at May 04, 2013 12:49 PM (PGO8C)

 

Late to see this but if you're still here, yes I usually just have a tab open to the group all day.

262 We can always go HHGTTG and ship the useless to another planet as an "advance" party. Although in HHGTTG the people tossed away like that were actually useful -- just annoyingly so. They didn't have any welfare queens on that ship -- just lots of hairdressers, interior decorators, and management consultants.

263 222 Question: Any reason I should be hesitant to buy E-mycin at the pet shop to treat my inner ear infection? Posted by: garrett at May 04, 2013 01:19 PM (jPY3+) ------------------- Inner ear infections are nothing to mess with. Sorry, but you need to see a doc. He'll do a culture, if necessary, to identify the bacterium. E-mycin doesn't work on everything and MIGHT actually do harm.

264 How did it become my responsibility to provide meaning to someone else's life?

Besides, if we stopped worrying about them and supporting them into our self-designed pigeonholes of projecting our needs / wants / desires onto society at large - which is what the Progressive Libtards do - we'd be amazed that these so-called dullards will be surprisingly creative and enduring.

To think that this is a problem is Luddite thinking. Your Gaussian distribution hasn't altered for the whole of history; it's sheer elitist hubris to think that today is somehow different. What bunk!

265

The IQ thing is another one of touchy subjects where ideology trumps the data. The fact is (correct me if I'm wrong - please!) that blacks in the US score a full standard deviation below practically everybody else, and that's HUGE.

 

 

Put it this way. To use invent an unkind term, suppose we call the people who are more than one standard deviation to the left of the curve "dumb as a rock". That's probably a bit too harsh a term, but I'll use it here to define the bottom 16%. Whatever you call it, 50% of blacks fall in this category, vs the 16% among other demographics.

 

 

Now let's go the other way. Lets call the top 16% "smart as a whip", (which is probably a bit too kind). With their curve 1 standard deviation to the left, only about 2.5% of blacks fall in this category.

 

 

The Left concludes that there is some sort of biological law that blacks MUST have the same IQ as everybody else, despite there being a wide disparity of other physiological traits,  and therefore the IQ tests MUST be biased! The joke of it is, that other groups of people - from every race and ethinic group imaginable, including people who haven't lived as Americans for CENTURIES - do just fine. Further, in the "Voter ID" debate, the same people make the tacitly racist claim that blacks are too incompetent to get their butts down to register, and therefore are "disenfranchised" by having to produce a birth certificate!

 

 

The problem nobody wants to talk about is that people with such a low IQ will naturally live in a world where they can just never seem to catch a break. They're never going to say, "well, it's because most of us aren't very smart." They're ALWAYS going to look for scapegoats, and "whitey" will always be at the top of the list.

 

 

Nobody also wants to observe that Asians actually do a little better than whites, and are actually MORE discriminated against than whites in college admissions.

 

 

Anyway, that's my thesis for how the Hispanics might not be completely hopeless, as far as embracing libertarian ideals (I think they do better, IQ-wise), while the vast majority of the black population will NEVER come around, always resorting to voting themselves goodies produced by others, to get much of anything. Hell - they've got 50% unemployment, and voted TFG back in because he has a dark complexion!!

 

 

On a final note, let us not conflate the idea of having a higher IQ with general "worth". It's not "racist" to identify IQ differences among races; racism is about tribalism, denying opportunities or rights because somebody's not in your group.  True, higher IQ tends to help in the job market, and life itself, but it isn't everything, and having too high an IQ can actually be a problem in various ways.

266 Great post, Monty --- and interesting comments too!

267 215 "Until they come up with a machine that can automatically update Java, Quicktime and Flash via Group Policy, I'm pretty safe." ---------------------- (MS Powershell, perl WMIC scripts) Posted by: WinLinBSD_Admin at May 04, 2013 01:18 PM -------------------------------- Or just a ninite exe kicked off by group policy But eventually anything you set up will probably quit working and someone will be needed to fix that.

268 But IMHO we are not headed for a high-tech efficiency society with angry dullards on the bottom, ala 1984. Government will always intrude and is not that smart. Have you bought a new dishwasher or range or washing machine lately? They don't work. Period. Not "they don't clean well" but "don't work."  More likely, it will be the end of the machine age. You think robots will work any better?

So we are going back to the future, where we will be cleaning our clothes on rocks in the river. Or living on Soviet Russia, where a benevolent state lies to us and wrecks our lives with their reality every day.

269 There a lots of examples of people with high IQ's that are dysfunctioning humans in regular society.  There's smart and then there is wise.  They don't test for wisdom.

270 Posted by: Margarita DeVille at May 04, 2013 01:49 PM (C8mVl)

Yes, thanks Monty for a very thought provoking post (& the kind of thing I only seem to find at AoS).  You caused me to avoid all sorts of "useful" work that must now be done in a compressed time-frame because I was reading this blog and the comments!

271 Ditto...  Thanks Monty !  Good discussion too.

272 I have often thought about this, and what many people forget is that "the economy" is entirely predicated around satisfying human needs. Even dumb people are human and have needs, thus the economy will automatically create supply at the right price for them. Thus you would probably end up with a bimodal distribution of wealth and income, and yet the left mode wouldn't be starving and dead - they would simply not have the trappings of the more productive. That sounds horrible to our egalitarian minds but in reality, we are already so rich that many people could very easily satisfy their own needs with minimal work (as productivity increases for the top, the prices for everyone keeps falling - you can free ride on this and everyone is better off.) I mean seriously, a small apartment, internet connection, food and cheap beer and I'd be pretty happy. Redistribution only makes this more doable. And for some people leisure time is far, far more valuable than money, and its tax free!

273 PJ at May 04, 2013 01:52 PM (ZWaLo)

Your dishwashers don't work because your detergent doesn't have phosphates in it anymore.

Go to HomeDepot and buy TSP in the paint department.

Add some of that to your dishwasher.

Your dishes will be clean again.

274 Oh, and a PleasurBot 2000 from Sony.

275

"228 In that particular case [Singapore], you will then have 115+ IQ people doing welding and mopping restrooms, and probably a lot unhappier about it than someone further down the bell curve would be. ...."

 

 

Singapore is a case study in how everything the Left says about economics couldn't be more wrong.  They say it's about "natural resources", meaning "wealth just exists, people don't MAKE it", and that's necessary - on their part - because it helps in their moral argument to seize that wealth. But I digress!

 

The folks in Singapore will either hire people to come in to do that stuff for them, or buy or invent technology that will eliminate most of that work.

 

Don't e such a Luddite!  (I guess that's the word of the day!)

276 And for some people leisure time is far, far more valuable than money, and its tax free! Posted by: sexypig at May 04, 2013 01:54 PM ---------------------------------------- SEXY leisure time??

277 Posted by: sexypig at May 04, 2013 01:54 PM (dZQh7)

Only so long as the cheap beer is also good beer!

278 @Optimizer, the races are mixing fairly rapidly at this point. I'd like to see if lower IQ portions of races are mixing. Probably since as part of the progress I have seen in California is now you have groups of scumbags that are integrated.

279 I don't understand any of this.

280 Singapore is such an unusual country. Almost 40% of the residents are foreign guest workers. And the chinese majority Singapore citizens have a birth rate that makes the Japanese look fecund.

281

"239 ... Look into companies that do industrial testing. Especially RF system testing. Almost everything we build now goes to Japan, China or India."

 

Thanks!  Anything someone can do to make themselves more qualified (if you're still around)?

282 sexypig at May 04, 2013 02:01 PM (dZQh7)

I don't think race mixing is like mixing paint... ie you get a uniform brown.

I think with race mixing, you get more of a continuum...with a pure race at each end of the continuum, and a graduated blend inbetween.

Both of the pure races are self sustaining, as well as the blend.

283 From our foremost living philosopher on the American workplace: http://www.dilbert.com/2013-05-03/

284 Actually hispanic intermarriage has gone down in the last decade as the pool of available hispanics has grown. The groups that outmarries the most are east asian women. The east asian population isn't that huge and east asian chicks like white dudes and vice versa. The vast majority of Americans still marry and have children with a partner of their own racial, ethnic group. This is true for all of the big Census categories. Also I think "asian" outmarriage is going down as more south asian immigration has grown. East asian chicks and white dudes seem to like each other a lot. South asian chicks and white dudes much less so.

285 I always thought that the right needs to come up with some way to tax leisure, and those greedy people who consume more than their fair of leisure time. I developed this line of thinking when I was in Taiwan, and a friend (very smart guy) was living a life where he would work just enough to get national healthcare and travel money, and then he would travel around the world having fun. This guy was totally liberal and wanted higher taxes for the rich. It kind of pissed me off, because I knew that guy could have worked full time, and also provided more tax revenue. Instead he could enjoy his leisure "tax free" with me subsidizing it. The same argument can be made about childless people. Since SS and Medicare depend on future workers to pay for it, by not having children, you are not "paying in." You also should have oodles more money, since you don't have any kids, and you also have oodles more free time and leisure time. Thus those people should be taxed higher for their "greed" in this matter.

286 "All hail Chairman Roddenberry. And his biggest lunacy was that we would all develop into a bunch of scientists and college professors rather than a debased culture of hedonism and waste." How are these not two sides of the same coin? And haven't they always been?

287 290 I always thought that the right needs to come up with some way to tax leisure, and those greedy people who consume more than their fair of leisure time.

The Left has already done that -- it's called imputed income.

288 Go to HomeDepot and buy TSP in the paint department. TSP is okay, but I tried the 'Oxyclean dishwashing booster' and it is un-fucking-believable. Use a lot at first -- as per directions -- to really clean the inside of the machine, then about 1/4 teaspoon per load along with your regular dw detergent. Environmentally okay stuff, too. Probably adds about a nickel to the cost of each load, but it's worth it to me.

289 A "race" or "ethnic group" is just a very extended family. And like families you can belong to several. I am part of both my mother and father's extended family. And there are larger clans above that. Keep going out and eventually you get to ethnicities and races. And then to just humanity as a whole. It's not so much about "purity" or anything like that. It's just some people you are more closely related to than others and share more genes with. You can take blind DNA tests and computers will automatically sort a group of people by race and ethnicity without looking at any names or faces, just based on statistical measures of genetic difference.

290 In this current "brave new world" the "smarter" people work for the "dumb".  Welfare, bureaucrats.. 

No need to tax childless people, they don't have the number of dependents to deduct. And who's to say they are not charitable. Why tax? More power for the powerful i guess.

291 Regular Moron at May 04, 2013 02:11 PM (U2UQk)

Thanks for the tip.  I'll check it out.

292

"255 You didn't ask me, and I'm no expert, but if I were getting started in this stuff, and wanted to get some things going quickly, I'd at least take a look at Lego. Seriously. There seems to be a lot of cool stuff going on, and I can see how using those blocks would get you past a lot of the physical construction and on to the fun control stuff."

 

 

Well I know there's some sort of robotics program called Lego IIRC for middle schoolers. I was actually involved in the High School robotics deal at my kid's high school (something called "FIRST"), but it went horribly wrong.

 

What happened was that it turned out to be a scam. I plunked down $500, and you had a bunch of blowhards lecturing away at the kids at times, and encouraging them to come up with their own ideas, but in the end, it turned out to be the kind of scam that Obama would be proud of. A big shot in the local corporation that was providing the grants essentially had his own little playground for him and his two sons (who were in the program). Most of the other "volunteers" were apparently either explicitly or implicitly arm-twisted by him to attend, while the teachers (who got to put stuff on their resume) played along. My kid and I got to play around with programming robots a bit, but were essentially not allowed to have anything to do with the competition - only Mr. big shot's stuff was allowed. We knew better than to join again the following year.

 

The competition in general showed that a lot of this stuff was going on.  The better teams had robots that the high school-ers had little to do with. But it was at least encouraging to see a lot of teenagers partying up at an essentially very nerdy event - celebrating technology.

 

And, naturally, there was a certain socialist flavor to the whole thing.

293 @294 PC crime alert: Bing Arab consanguinity IMO, often at least tangentially relevant these days.

294

Third Horseman, the college degree requirement IIRC from other commentators is a scam by business HR departments to protect themselves from lawsuits from the truly less qualified. That it feeds the diploma mill is just bonus.

 

I'm thinking of starting a business that provides prospective employees with a certificate that they are not gangbangers from the ghetto, can read and write, and will generally show up for work when they're supposed to. I'm going to market it as a cheaper alternative than a college degree, but serving the same functions for most jobs.

295 Unemployment?  Now?  So paraphrase Bubba, "It's the economic policy, stupid."

296 Many, many, many SF novels have been written on this topic over the 20th century. One of the early silent films (Metropolis) related to this also. Basically 2 conclusions: utopia where almost everything is free and people are free to be writers, sculptors, artists, whatever. A highly unlikely scenario because the Idiocracy is unable to, and does not want to, do this. Second alternative -- distopia where basic stuff is free and the proles are free to fight, f*ck, and destroy stuff. The Idiocracy makes this far more likely. However I suggest a 3rd alternative will occur which is a mix of both. A 21st century global world where the actual brightest (e.g. not the Ivy League credentialed naval gazers) will do 21st century things, a 20th century world where there will be inexpensive nice things (HDTV, google glasses, smart phones, big box stores, decent services and utilities, etc.) where people will work part time and make enough to get by, and a 9th century world (think Detroit nationally, and Islam internationally) where the savages will enjoy drugs, murder, and corruption.

297 Jay Guevara at May 04, 2013 02:25 PM (IDSI7)

Good idea.  But... you have a choice to make in regards to your business model.

You can either provide this certificate to everyone who asks.  In which case it will have zero predictive power.  So employers will pay it no mind.  So you will be selling a useless product.  But a legal product.

Or you can screen out applicants which do not meet those criteria.  Which will have a disparate racial impact.  Which will lead to your being sued out of existence.

Choose wisely.

298 Coming in at he very end,  but off the top of my head can think of a few businesses which would use the lower part of the bell curve with no difficulty.

The problem we have, more than anything, is convincing people that all work has value.  This starts at a young age when you praise a child for making his bed or taking out the trash.  We have a huge number of fmailies who are raising children who are simply incapable of work,   whether manual or intellectual.  They cannot clean or garden,  and they cannot study,  either.  They are basically watchers of television,  listeners of iPods,  and players of video games.

Well,  I am not as pessimistic as some are.  I think it possible that an unknown developement will change our course.

And because of my Faith,  I believe all people have value.

299 And because of my Faith, I believe all people have value.

Miss Marple at May 04, 2013 02:37 PM (GoIUi)

This.

300 "Tell 'em I can hoist a jack, and I can lay a track I can pick and shovel too, ain't no machine can. That's been proved to you." Hey! John Henry! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mj8QuwfIYM

301

"283 @Optimizer, the races are mixing fairly rapidly at this point. I'd like to see if lower IQ portions of races are mixing.

Probably since as part of the progress I have seen in California is now you have groups of scumbags that are integrated."

 

 

My biracial niece put a posting on Facebook that was interesting in this regard.  It made note of the racial mixing, and put forth the notion that racial boundaries would ultimately disappear as a result.

 

 

That's when things got amusing (from my perspective). You should have heard the race-baiters, who are constantly supposedly railing against racism, go nuts at the suggestion!

 

In the final analysis, it was ridiculous to talk about this stuff as though it's even anything NEW. Ethnic groups and races have been intermixing forever, and the result has never been the elimination of races and ethnic groups, but rather the creation of new ones!

 

The discouraging part is that the article ended up where they always seem to - a new group (this one was for mixed race/ethnicity) looking to be recognized for its place within the ranks of Victimhood. Hell, in this town my mother was "bi-ethnic", by virtue of her father being German, and her mother being Irish. It's nothing new, especially in THIS country.

 

302 I'm concerned that the world will evolve toward the one that Pvt Mandela sees on return from his first mission in the novel The Forever War. Because relativity rears its ugly head, Mandela see the world of the future and almost everyone is on the dole, sitting at home and smoking joints. Of course, those people are expendable, as Mandela finds out when his mother becomes ill and is denied life saving medical treatment (sort of like modern day Britain).

I suspect the solution is the one that Mandela finds, and that is to go back to space and stay in the military. He and his mates are elites, of course, but the real salvation for mankind will likely involve sending a broad range of people to the new frontier when it finally opens up. It's never a good idea to try and guess where evolution is going. You never know when a particular "skill" will be needed. Remember what happened to the Golgafringians when they exported the "useless" segment of society. They died from a virulent infection caused by an unsanitized telephone, a skill they had deemed unnecessary.

303 "...and when they break, they can be thrown away and replaced with a new machine with no muss and no fuss."

Or they can be rebuilt to be pretty much like brand new. Again.

304 Yeah, mixing of groups doesn't eliminate groups -- it just creates a new one. There's a leftist fantasy out there that we'll all become some uniform beige. (They seem happy about the prospect of ethnically cleansing whites -- very quiet about eliminating blacks.) That doesn't happen. Hispanics are a mix of white europeans and amerindians (who are an east asian branch). In certain countries like Brazil throw in a decent African component. North Africans and a mix of sub-saharan Africans and mediterranian whites. Result is you get groups like Berbers with a very strong ethnic identity -- but blacks and whites didn't disappear. The generic "white" in America is a mix of so many euro ethnic groups. But Italians, Irish, and Germans still exist in Europe even if they *mostly* merged here in the US. South Asians are a hybrid people from thousands of years ago who now outnumber every other ethnic group on the planet -- including the groups that mixed together to form them so long ago.

305 OT:  Benghazi timeline coverup at Doug Ross is damning.  Link in my sig.

306 Name that party:

Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. just canÂ’t catch a break.

Mr. Boyland, who was previously charged with soliciting bribes to pay his legal bills in an unrelated corruption trial, was indicted again last March for wire fraud charges stemming from alleged abuse of per diem requests. And he was just charged yet again today.

“Boyland engaged in a scheme to defraud New York State by steering public funds to a Brooklyn based non-profit organization (‘Non-Profit AÂ’) and then directing that a portion of those public funds be used to pay for community events promoting Boyland and on goods such as t-shirts imprinted with the slogan ‘Team BoylandÂ’ which were distributed at those events,” a press release from the U.S. AttorneyÂ’s office this evening declared.

“To conceal this scheme, Boyland allegedly directed members of his staff to instruct vendors involved in the community events to falsely list Non-Profit A, and not Boyland, as the purchaser on invoices for goods purchased for the events,” it continued. “A representative of Non-Profit A then submitted the fraudulent invoices to the New York State Office for the Aging (‘NYSOFA’), which administered the public funds, without disclosing that these invoices were for events and goods promoting Boyland.”

But wait.  There's more!

(from his assemblyman webpage bio)

"Boyland also sponsored legislation to create the GovernorÂ’s Employment and Training Council, which puts unemployable and untrained constituents back to work."

unemployable and untrained working -- distribution of "Team Boyland" t-shirts, no doubt about it.  Brilliant!

307 that benghazi timeline is brutal

308

"... Today, we have reached the point where we can maintain and even grow our GDP with less and less human input into the process. ..."

 

 

What we're seeing is the inevitable triumph of the "maker" over the "takers". ObamaCare and the minimum wage were a shake-down by the less valuable "takers", and the "makers" said, "Screw you, you'd cost too much - we can find cheaper ways to do it without you."

 

Naturally, the "takers" are shocked and outraged. They are the ugly mob that only knows that it wants stuff, and if it gathers up other like-minded people they can just take it. At least until the "makers" either figure out a way to keep their stuff, or decide to simply not "make" it in the first place, since it will only be stolen from them.

 

 

It's not exactly rocket science, but if you don't want to believe it you simply won't.

309 About IQ -- Something I noticed. I know my IQ, I know my wife's, and I know both of my children's as my wife was able to get the test results from the school. My son hung out with me all the time, bumped me off the computer at the age of three, was building his own computers and networking computers before he got acne, and he got my IQ plus a couple. My daughter hung out with my wife, and got her IQ plus a couple. We married young and stayed married, although my daughter told us, among all of her high school friends, she was the exception with the 'original' set of parents. Giving an IQ number sounds like bragging, which I don't mind doing sometimes, but giving the statistical probability sounds less so, so someone having an IQ as high as my sons is 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 20,000 range. But single moms are the greatest! It takes a village to raise a child! War on women! Actually none of the above. It's not the governments job (or best interest) to make it easier for families to dissolve and support two sets of parents and the children in separate households. But this is what they have done and are doing.

310

I haven't even looked at the Benghazi timeline yet, but you don't to be brilliant to realize that if they don't allow the FBI on the scene for THREE WEEKS, that there is a MAJOR cover-up going on, and that the FBI has apparently not been corrupted by the current administration (at least not yet).

 

 

The excuses being made sound like junior high - it's unbelievable to hear from grown-ups, much less high-ranking government officials. "What difference does it make!?" ... "That was a long time ago." ... Still most media are part of the cover-up. It's scary and unreal.

 

 

Those whistle-blowers coming out are a heartwarming reminder that there are still real-life American heroes, and a scathing commentary on the state of the media.

311 218 - "That's [acquiring firearms is] only phase I. Phase II: breed. You need more hands on deck to use said firearms." Yes, but my breeding days are behind me. Results: one son, very high IQ AND common sense. Prospects: his are excellent. Sadly, he and his talented lady-friend seem content to rear rescue dogs in lieu of grandchildren. So...

312 Unfortunately, I think the answer is obvious. Mao Zedong and Pol Pot figured it out pretty quick. Annihilation of the educated class by sheer force and greater numbers. Like Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, don't guess what will happen. Don't want it to happen. But be ready for what DOES happen.

313 One of the problems with current society is the conflation of formal education with intelligence, leading to a lot of inefficiency born from who is allowed entry into what fields. Passing in the classroom often has no bearing on qualification in the real world. Most of the things employers require a college education for don't actually need it, except in fields like engineering and medicine. This leads to a lot of intelligent people who get hedged out of work they can succeed at, and a lot of educated idiots running the show.

314 Great post, Monty! I got here late and have read all the comments. (Great comments, too.) I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, Player Piano. It was published in 1950 and is about exactly this topic--a world where machines do most of the work and a lot of people just sit around with nothing much to do. Vonnegut was working in the PR department of General Electric at the time, and of course he kept hearing lots of predictions about how machines and robots would make our lives easier in the future.

315 318 Cato: The reason for that is because employers used to be able to give tests to prospective employees that measured intelligence or aptitude. But since certain races and ethnic groups tended to score better than others, those tests are now considered discriminatory. So the employers began requiring college degrees instead.

316 If the left side of the curve had to figure out how to support themselves, then they would. They always have; every advance of humankind in the entirety of its history has created exactly the same problem for that end of the curve. Yet we still have...that end of the curve. What you call a problem is actually a condition of human society. This condition has always been there; why do you think that this time be different? Just because you cannot think of a solution doesn't mean that they won't. The fight for survival is wonderfully stimulating - and winnable.

I do not believe in the perfectibility of humankind; I don't even believe in its improvement. But I have unlimited belief in its creativity, which creativity is not and never has been limited to the 'elites' (eloi?) on the right end of the curve.

317 Monty said: <i>"... Today, we have reached the point where we can maintain and even grow our GDP with less and less human input into the process. ..."</i>

It's a bit different, IMO. As technology is filling the lower job occupancies, it just makes it clearer that the majority of our civilization's advancement is due to those who occupy the far right tail of the g-loaded/IQ distribution.

Think an <i>Archimedes Lever</i> effect whereby a small force can exert an outsized, nonlinear outcome on a larger mass.

Throughout history we've seen the same pattern of a small number of either highly motivated or highly intelligent individuals shape the events which followed: from people like a Newton or Guass, von Neumann or Einstein, to the Michaelangelos and Descartes, or the Huns, Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler.


The illusion is that progress has been a product of the advancement (or work) of the masses, of the middle of the distribution. But, contra Marx, this is just an illusion -- which is why advanced education of the masses is a losing proposition.

318 If the left side of the curve had to figure out how to support themselves, then they would.

You do realize, globally, that "left side of the curve" lives off less than $3/day in shanty towns or overcrowded villages.

Hell, in supporting my last post, it's only the work of the extreme far right tail of the distribution which improves their quality-of-life substantially. Gates Foundation and Malaria, the US and our food and AIDS relief. Eradication of smallpox, whooping cough, etc.

319 Actually, there already is a policy that provides work for those with mediocre intelligence, talent, and skills. It's called "government". The expansion of government provides very well-paying jobs for people who would likely do much worse if they actually had to compete in the free market, where their limited abilities would not be worth much. This also has the effect of giving those mediocre people entirely unearned and undeserved power over those who are much more intelligent and skilled. I imagine the statists regard this as a feature, not a bug.

320 <i>You do realize, globally, that "left side of the curve" lives off less than $3/day in shanty towns or overcrowded villages.</i>

I've worked in those areas (energy, petroleum). Poverty is our definition, not theirs. Nor does it have anything to do with intelligence, much less creativity. As The Political Hat pointed out (up in post #96) machines & technology merely free up the individual to produce more stuff besides his/her subsistence. Compare the souls of the folks who hang around the NGO distribution centers in Eritrea with those of the folks in the country-side: it isn't ennobling to live on freebies.

$3/day doesn't mean a whole lot to these villagers, because that is only an average. Many of them live on $0/day, and their economy is unrecognizable to us. So what? Money isn't the only item that can be used as a store of value; it is merely convenient in the more complex societies. And even there it isn't necessary - only massively convenient.

321 Even more aggravating is how I remember Obama blaming ATMs, in part for unemployment, putting tellers out of work. When you're saying the same thing as Obama, regarding anything having to do with economics - well, I'm sorry, but you need to take a deep breath look in the mirror, and spend a few days rethinking some of your basic premises.

I sided with Obama on that one.

Sometimes someone says something genuinely noxious and stupid; quite often, it's Obama (and Biden, Pelosi et al.). But sometimes someone says something that's basically, um, true; perhaps not parsed perfectly, but you can see where he's trying to go with that.

Conservatives deliberately distorted that ATM comment, like Leftists distorted Romney's binder-of-women. Yet another (minor) reason I sat the last election out.

322 I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. What have you got to say for yourselves?

323 I'm well aware of China's demographics.
I'm not saying they will invade the world.
I'm saying China will be, by far, the richest most powerful country in the world after 2030. And the transition will happen quicker than Americans expect.

Uh no it won't. China has huge problems that you are ignoring. For one thing it is a Communist country - hello, that never works, and never will. Think about how badly Obamao is screwing up this country's econonmy then multiply that by a minimum of 10 for a pure Communist government.

China has already peaked and they won't be recovering. They've had the most people of any country for a long time - never has done them much good. Their people - like the people in the Russian Federation - simply don't know how to be free so even the collapse of Communism there won't help them.

324

Two things from reading this story.

 

1) Darwin will NOT be cheated.  He is coming for the weak and ill-adapted one way or another.

 

2) "For many people, it means a life lived in vain -- fit only for government handouts and welfare, a life bereft of meaning or goals, a life consumed by minutiae, tedium, and waste. For many people, it means a life lived in vain -- fit only for government handouts and welfare, a life bereft of meaning or goals, a life consumed by minutiae, tedium, and waste."  These people will not live lives of quiet despair. 

 

If they are miimally intelligent and self-aware enough to recognizr their position, they wil be a permanent criminal and/or terrorist class.  Just like Mid Eastern countries whose privileged young adults have too much time and not enough to do, the people left of this centerline will become neemies of the state.

325 Can not see the future said: So what? Money isn't the only item that can be used as a store of value; it is merely convenient in the more complex societies.

Money is a bit different, it's value to us isn't in any intrinsic value it may hold (as you correctly point out), but as a price signal which conveys information. It conveys the economies distributed and continually updated calculation about what value X, Y, or Z holds.

So, my point was using this information-based view as a standard metric or window into just how *not getting by* the vast majority of the distribution is in day-to-day life compared to those on the far right tail, who really are responsible for our civilizations advancement.

Your point was that the masses in the middle and on the left would manage if left to their own agency. They will and *cannot*. See the RA Heinlein quote:

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”"

326 It seems to me that there is a deliberate policy of diluting the white population in regions where they predominate: Europe and North America. I realize that this sounds like Bilderberger-type stuff, but I can't shake the thought that it is intentional on the part of the world's elites. In both places, massive immigration from the Third World is being encouraged despite strenuous objections from the majority white population. Maybe the elites saw that majority white countries tend to be wealthier and healthier than countries where other races predominate, and are attempting to level the playing field. Since the bottom can only be lifted up so far, they are trying to push the top down. Whether this is motivated by leftist social engineering or white guilt, I don't know. Of course, the elites who have devised and implemented this policy (if it is in fact deliberate) are themselves mostly white. Perhaps they are trying to recreate Latin American society on a global scale, where the ruling class is a tiny hereditary caste of whites who control most of the wealth and property, and lord it over the darker masses.

327

Your premises are so fallacious they are not even wrong. But the kind of social science crap you are peddling here gets my blood up so I'll start with:

So what?

Granting - for the sake argument - that IQ is randomly distributed (and this is by no means as settled a fact as you suggest: the sample size is much too small relative to the entire population of all humans that have ever existed) does not give us any special insights as to the future course of human society.

Simply consider yourself: Are your ancestors all on the right side of the IQ curve? Most certainly not. And the same is true for all living humans. Yet here you are, using this forum to pass some trivial statistical artifact off as wisdom. Does this not logically undercut your entire premise?

BTW, you might ask yourself why the shape of the distribution should make any difference? What if it were shown that IQ followed a power law distribution?

Finally,  your premise ignores the time domain: All human characteristics change over time and in ways that are NOT accessible to statistical theory. Therefore, using simplifying statistical models to predict the capabilities of future individuals or groups is bullshit. 

 

328 329 Advo: If you look at the history of totalitarian collectivist societies, it's actually the intelligent that they fear. Look at Cambodia under Pol Pot: Educated people were marched into the rice paddies at gunpoint and forced to do manual labor. Those who couldn't or wouldn't were executed. No, it's mostly the highly intelligent who are most likely to resist collectivism, and become Enemies of the State. Those on the left side of the bell curve are net beneficiaries of collectivism, and are likely to go along, since they will have better lives than they would in a free meritocratic society. Collectivist societies tend to target and weed out the most intelligent, creative, and free-thinking citizens, since those are the greatest threats to the controlling elites. We are already starting to see this process in America, where the left side of the bell curve are overwhelmingly Obama supporters. True, the rest of his supporters are those who are highly educated, but that is only because they assume that they will end up on top of society. History shows that they may be greatly mistaken.

329 329 Advo: I forgot to mention that the intelligent may not necessarily be the "fittest" in a totalitarian collectivist society. Such societies tend to select for dumb herd animals.

330 I have to say that while "more education" hasn't worked, "better education" might. Right now the school system does nothing to teach kids -- no matter how bright or stupid -- how to DO things. You don't leave school knowing how to fix a car, or do double-entry bookkeeping, or cook a meal, or draw a recognizable portrait, or play an instrument, or write a coherent research paper. What you do learn in school is a very poorly-taught and dumbed-down college preparatory curriculum suitable for liberal arts . . . you know, like someone who's getting an Education degree. All teachers know is how to train other teachers.

331 Many robots already do this to some degree (space probes, complex computer systems, industrial robots).

Posted by: Monty at May 04, 2013 12:04 PM (G8OwX)

I disagree (says the guy who fixes industrial robots). They can diagnose themselves to a certain degree, but broken is broken. Space probes and complex computer systems do not really "fix" themselves, they simply route around the existing problem (which is why military and space hardware have redundancy built-in to their design). Once all the alternate routes are broken, game over.

However, fixing these machines takes a degree of intelligence beyond the average button pusher job. Take auto mechanics, for instance, where once we had skilled craftsmen who were masters at their craft, today we have parts replacers with a diagnostic computer.

332 GGE- mentioning of craft brings me into the equation-

We are a long way from having robots that can replace carpenters.

333 I have to say that while "more education" hasn't worked, "better education" might. Right now the school system does nothing to teach kids -- no matter how bright or stupid -- how to DO things.

Posted by: Trimegistus at May 04, 2013 06:15 PM (xAp2X)

What's worse, they DO teach how do do things...they teach to toe the line, to conform, to not question authority, to be good little button-pushing drones...and then we're upset when that is all they are good at producing. The system is working, it's just not working the way we need it to work right now. It would have been fine for a button pushing job economy...but now all the buttons are being pushed by Robbie the Robot.

334 We are a long way from having robots that can replace carpenters.

Posted by: typo dynamofo at May 04, 2013 06:23 PM (WVMUQ)

Not so much. Load the material into a jig, a robot punches the staples in, all you need human workers for is to maintain the machinery and move the materials around. Now if you are talking about the craftsmanship that you get out of, for example, Amish furniture, you are absolutely right...unfortunately these skills are slowly being lost because mass-produced, while not as "good", is cheaper.

335 This thesis is an old trope that has been around for over a century. The eugenics movement of the late 19th century was based upon the same concern expressed in this article. Indeed, the abortion movement, specifically, Planned Parenthood, was founded explicitly with the idea of culling the unfortunate racial masses.

That, by the way, is a wonderful way to confound a leftist. "You are either for abortion or you are a racist Mr. Marx. Which are you, sir?"

In reality there was no significant problem until just very lately. We are reaching a point where the below the mean folks are becoming less and less useful to the economy. Remember that the average intelligence is 100. I don't really care if you believe the measurement technique but it is clear that half the world is dumber than rocks. If you have ever worked -- in an urban setting -- with the lower half of the curve then it is intuitive. Think of TSA screening and adult hamburger flippers.

Sadly, also think of many graduates from schools of education. The rigid stupidity of the educational establishment is indicative of the heavily structured systems required by the dull to function.

This, however, has been a deadly discussion for the last thirty-five to forty years. Look at what the academic mob did to William Shockley (Nobel, transistors) in the 1970's for even doing the math for this.

In the end we will wind up taxing the capable to support the incapable. Gotta be fair, dontchaknow.

336 Just in case anyone else is still reading this thread, here is an intereting take on the Progressive elite and the hoi polloi they would keep around as pets: http://tinyurl.com/clkbq9s

337 Good post, The Political Hat.

338 Good post, The Political Hat. Posted by: rickl at May 04, 2013 06:53 PM (sdi6R) TY. The original article I referred to is a must read, IMHO. The Progressives are either elitists, or the hoi polloi who fancy themselves the elite...

339 The causes for our job stagnation is very easy to see: you don't export 20 million plus jobs out of country without tanking the job market. For every 100 factiry jobs exported out, we lose a ttal of around 7000 jobs.

340 Very interesting article.

341 If it is true that duller people cannot simply be made smarter through training or schooling or other forms of conditioning...how can they be gainfully employed in the highly-automated, high-technology workforce of the 21st century? Oh, I dunno. Why don't you ask Janet Napolitano or John F'n Kerry?

342 And yet the reproduction rate among the dull is treble that of the intelligencia.  They have become the parasites in the Red Queen's Race, and we are faced with evolving new solutions to prevent their dominance over us; which would result in a new dark ages.

343

Machine sales and service.  The more machines, the more salesmen you need to sell them, and the more servicemen you need to use the machines that fix the machines the salesman sold.  And for those second machines that the servicemen use to fix the first machines, somebody has to sell them, too.  Etc.

Salesmen will come more and more from the left of the IQ spectrum, as people on the right will more likely recognize the benefits of specialized training and education.  In the past, salesmen were probably slightly to the right of center on that spectrum, because they needed to be able to keep accounts - a job that called for at least a high school education, which many laborers didn't have.  Keeping accounts is done today by machines (or applications on machines), which means that a salesman doesn't have to have the same amount of "smarts" or cognitive ability (people skills are still required, more than ever, but those are largely unrelated to pure cognitive ability).  Right of center (i.e., "kinda smart") people who used to be salesmen will go into designing machines and applications, or into management of all the new designers, sellers, and servicers of all the new machines and applications.

The kind of guys who used to be salesmen are now lawyers (but the kind of guys who used to be lawyers are still lawyers, which unfortunately makes for too many lawyers).  The kind of guys who used to do physical labor are now salesmen.

344 Thanks, Taco Stand, additives solved that problem. But I'm talking about mechanical/computer failures, like the gasket falling off, computer not functioning so it never turns on. Or glasses breaking b/c the water knocks them against each other.

345 Machine that lays railroad ties. Very few people needed for hard labor. Mostly, skilled workers monitoring the machine. http://youtu.be/_MKcTbYDP7w

346 Holy shit. Outstanding work, Monty. Loved this piece so much I am willing to step out of the LURKDOM shadow to praise you. * Slips slowly back into the mist.

347 beauty > intelligence for half the population.

348 I have prepped for the robot apocalypse, I own a circuit breaker.

349 Put the unskilled into uniform. Three weeks of musket drill, then off to fight Napoleon.

350 TFG's nickname needs to be changed from King Putz to King Ludd, for single handedly bringing down Western Civilization and for yoking with the muzzy brotherhood and that gang of terrorists.

351 people have been worried about this since the i.r.

chill man

if robots become that powerful then goods will become so cheap you will be able to afford practically anything on m.w.

America thrived and more ppl were working than ever after the i.r. We absorbed an almost 2x increase when women enterd the workforce.

the only think that can destroy our econ is bad gov policy. dont be a luddite. and go get a refresher via a wealth of nations summary or econ in on lesson by hazlit. its been explained b4...

and sides, if you give mainstream economists credit then you are in the wrong party.The chicago school is drivin the policy train these days man

352 Which make the idea of importing, legalizing 35mm low wage/low skill workers seem unthinkable. Immigration policies need to be aligned with our national interests not maudlin sentimentality.

353 I've pierced the veil at last! ACE is a robot, who is blogger/cob logger/commentators all rolled into one!