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Post by psuhistory on May 19, 2016 15:24:56 GMT -5
As far as "paying people not to work," if you're referring to the guaranteed basic income concept, I think that's where we're headed, sometime in the next 20-30 years. Tom Paine, we hardly knew ye...  All this newfangled, socialist rubbish... |
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Post by tnredsfan on May 19, 2016 22:57:14 GMT -5
As far as "paying people not to work," if you're referring to the guaranteed basic income concept, I think that's where we're headed, sometime in the next 20-30 years. Tom Paine, we hardly knew ye... All this newfangled, socialist rubbish... I find it fascinating that modern conservatives love quoting the Founding Fathers and long for the return of "constitutional government" while conveniently ignoring many of the things said Founding Fathers wrote, said, and believed. |
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Post by psuhistory on May 20, 2016 8:40:00 GMT -5
I find it fascinating that modern conservatives love quoting the Founding Fathers and long for the return of "constitutional government" while conveniently ignoring many of the things said Founding Fathers wrote, said, and believed. Some of them can be a slog, but Paine isn't. Great writer. Library of America published an edition of his pamphlets that does them proud, which includes Agrarian Justice and belongs in every conservative's library. AJ has some of his clearest statements about property: the idea of this "salary" or "national fund" was compensation for turning a common resource into personal property... |
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Post by Lark11 on May 20, 2016 9:01:43 GMT -5
I find it fascinating that modern conservatives love quoting the Founding Fathers and long for the return of "constitutional government" while conveniently ignoring many of the things said Founding Fathers wrote, said, and believed. Some of them can be a slog, but Paine isn't. Great writer. Library of America published an edition of his pamphlets that does them proud, which includes Agrarian Justice and belongs in every conservative's library. AJ has some of his clearest statements about property: the idea of this "salary" or "national fund" was compensation for turning a common resource into personal property... The Age of Reason is epic. |
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Post by psuhistory on May 20, 2016 10:47:02 GMT -5
Some of them can be a slog, but Paine isn't. Great writer. Library of America published an edition of his pamphlets that does them proud, which includes Agrarian Justice and belongs in every conservative's library. AJ has some of his clearest statements about property: the idea of this "salary" or "national fund" was compensation for turning a common resource into personal property... The Age of Reason is epic. Yeah, it was all fun and games until he started blowing up religion... I haven't read as much of the stuff that he wrote during the French Revolution. Agrarian Justice is one that I like, it reads like some of his American pamphlets from the 1770s. One of the things I admire about Paine is the way that he lived the Age of Revolutions like what we would now call an embedded journalist. He put himself in the middle of events, where people who didn't like his ideas could get their hands on him. He was like a political soldier that way, a ton of physical courage... |
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Post by Lark11 on May 20, 2016 11:05:46 GMT -5
The Age of Reason is epic. Yeah, it was all fun and games until he started blowing up religion... I haven't read as much of the stuff that he wrote during the French Revolution. Agrarian Justice is one that I like, it reads like some of his American pamphlets from the 1770s. One of the things I admire about Paine is the way that he lived the Age of Revolutions like what we would now call an embedded journalist. He put himself in the middle of events, where people who didn't like his ideas could get their hands on him. He was like a political soldier that way, a ton of physical courage... Yeah, as I recall, there's a literal break in the text in the middle of The Age of Reason where he writes about being detained and his attempts to ensure that the soldiers who detain him protect/deliver the Age of Reason manuscript he was working on. It amazes me how he identifies, and so clearly illustrates, the natural tension between science/education on one hand and religion on the other. Way back in the 1700s, he's explaining a problem that still badly plagues this country to this day. "The setters up...of the Christian system of faith, could not but foresee that the continually progressive knowledge that man would gain by the aid of science, of the power and wisdom of God, manifested in the structure of the universe....would...call into question, the truth of their system of faith; and therefore it became necessary...to cut learning down to a size less dangerous to their project...."Unreal. |
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Post by psuhistory on May 21, 2016 7:54:42 GMT -5
It amazes me how he identifies, and so clearly illustrates, the natural tension between science/education on one hand and religion on the other. Way back in the 1700s, he's explaining a problem that still badly plagues this country to this day. At the same time, he wasn't exactly offering an analysis of the major role played by the catholic/protestant churches/sects in the history of Western education. There may be a tension in some areas, but religious institutions have been a force for basic literacy. I think Paine's at his best when taking on vested interests, like an oligarchy built on a monopoly of landed wealth. His critique still has power because the oligarchy really existed, and in AJ, he wasn't proposing an abolition of property, just compensation for the loss of a common resource... Part of the power of the quoted statement lies in the idea of a clerical conspiracy to keep humanity in the dark. Interesting change of tone, and deism didn't leave much of anything to the church/organized religion. But one of the fun things about reading Paine is the general challenge to the idea that an independent America was built on a strong Christian religious faith... |
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Post by psuhistory on May 28, 2016 9:38:40 GMT -5
Trump won Centre County in the process of winning Pennsylvania. The county is split fairly evenly between Republicans and Democrats, with a number of voters about half the size of the main parties describing themselves as unaffiliated and a fraction of Libertarians...
I think the type of anger that gets voters to the polls can be a constructive part of a democratic process. It can lead to engagement on policy issues and genuine, patriotic debate about the country's direction...
In this part of Pennsylvania, Trump's campaign has also mobilized a different sort of anger. Just as an example, on Thursday afternoon I discovered a swastika and a racial obscenity scraped into a stall in the men's locker room at my local YMCA. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Klan used to hold big rallies in this part of Pennsylvania, as part of a national strategy to withdraw from the cities and to focus on majority-white areas of the rural US. By the late 1990s, law enforcement had encouraged the leaders of this initiative to move on...
But these types of feelings and ideas are not far below the surface here. Trump's campaign has also mobilized this type of anger, and it's coming back into the open. His campaign legitimates disaffection in a way that encourages voting, which is fine, but it also offers a license and a cover for anger that has a history of violence and intimidation in this part of the country...
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Post by Lark11 on Jun 2, 2016 22:37:44 GMT -5
I thought this was pretty interesting and I have a hard time disagreeing with any of it....well, except the transgender part of the argument....that's just weird. www.newsweek.com/trump-silicon-valley-2016-election-digital-divide-457426TECH & SCIENCE TRUMP REVOLUTION ROOTED IN RESENTMENT OF TECHNOLOGYBY KEVIN MANEY ON 5/9/16 AT 10:27 AM We’ve got two Americas now: Atoms America and Bits America.People used to worry about a digital divide. Well, that’s now looking more like the border between North Korea and South Korea—tense and bristling with pointed missiles, one nervous misunderstanding away from mayhem. This new dynamic is evident in everything from the transgender bathroom laws in the South to proposals from Silicon Valley to institute basic income for all the people technology is going to throw out of work.And while we’re at it, let’s include the 2016 presidential election, which is really all about Atoms vs. Bits. Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte, then head of the MIT Media Lab, wrote about the changing relationship between atoms and bits in his book Being Digital. Atoms make up physical stuff. Bits are digital. As Negroponte presciently pointed out, atoms represent the old economy of manufacturing and trucks and retail stores and, as it turns out, a lot of middle-class work. Bits drive the new economy—which today includes mobile apps, social networks, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, 3-D printing and other technologies that are eating the old economy. Atoms America is getting poorer and angrier. Bits America pretty much rules the global economy and churns out billionaires. Atoms America wants to “make America great again” because reclaiming the past seems a hell of a lot better than whatever the future holds. Bits America patronizingly believes that the Atoms people would be fine, at least in the short run, if they would only take some Khan Academy courses and learn to code. I saw this divide in real time in late April at a convention in San Diego called Lightfair International—the world’s big lighting industry show. A decade ago, almost every exhibitor and attendee was a hands-on lighting designer or manufacturer—real Atoms people. They hailed from Cincinnati or Calgary or Germany, possibly doing the same work their parents did. At the 2016 show, all the excitement had shifted to Internet of Things sensors in lights and all the data the devices will collect. A new generation of Silicon Valley computer jockeys roamed the floor, knowing they owned the industry’s future. The Atoms people looked dazed. The air in the hall smelled of careers getting incinerated. So Atoms America is pissed, and it has been giving the finger to Bits America—which is really what’s behind the so-called bathroom laws passed in North Carolina and Mississippi. When people look backward for inspiration, they rebel against those who push forward. But in Bits America, talent is everything, particularly in red-hot fields like data science and machine learning. No Bits America company can afford to drive away talent that happens to be gay or an immigrant, or even risk a hint of bias. Bits companies pretty much have to be progressive. So when conservatives running North Carolina passed a law that discriminates against the LGBT community, PayPal and Deutsche Bank canceled planned expansions there that would’ve brought in many Bits-oriented jobs. “We take our commitment to building inclusive work environments seriously,” said Deutsche Bank co-CEO John Cryan at the time.  Atoms America wants to “make America great again,” because reclaiming the past seems a hell of a lot better than whatever its future holds.North Carolina is heavily Atoms. It needs more Bits. Instead, it decided to piss off Bits, creating a deeper chasm. Same thing happened in Mississippi and Indiana, two other states firmly in Atoms America. Seems like a trend. The Bits are doing their part to be divisive jerks too. Right now, for instance, the Bits are sending the Atoms a very undiplomatic message about guaranteed basic income. Maybe you’ve heard about this. Basic income movements have been around for decades, but the concept made headlines this year when Sam Altman, the influential chief of tech incubator Y Combinator, got behind it. In the current Silicon Valley version, basic income is rooted in the idea that Bits America is essentially going to wipe out Atoms America’s jobs, and so we need to make sure the outmoded Atoms schlubs have enough money so they don’t revolt. “We think there could be a possibility where 95 percent of people won’t be able to contribute to the workforce,” said Matt Krisiloff, who manages Y Combinator’s basic income project. “We need to start preparing for that transformation.” Even if the notion of guaranteed income is well-intentioned, it sure sounds insulting to Atoms. It’s the Bits saying to them, “Your contributions will be worthless and unmarketable, so don’t even try to work. In fact, maybe don’t even go to college and rack up all that debt and waste all that time studying hard stuff you’ll never be able to use.” In this version of the future, all careers end up with the structure of the NBA—a thin slice of superstars get megarich, another thin layer might eke out a living in minor leagues, and everybody else just plays for fun. But no paycheck. Oh, and in case they didn’t make it clear: The tech elite will be the NBA. No wonder the Atoms feel mounting anger at the Bits. How do we know the Atoms are seething? Polls show that the single best predictor of a Donald Trump supporter in the GOP primaries is the absence of a college degree—the kinds of people already seeing their jobs automated away by software. His supporters tend to say they feel resentful and powerless. They feel screwed by Bits America. Voting for Trump is how they show it. To Bits America, Trump’s protectionist, isolationist messages are those bathroom laws writ large. His ideas are a threat to the Bits’ juggernaut. Turn away talented immigrant geeks? Make Apple manufacture every iPhone in the U.S.? Start trade wars that might lock Google or some coming cloud-based machine-learning technology out of global markets? Whoa—that’s disruptive, dude. Again, the digital divide is not new. A White House report in 2015 concluded that it “is concentrated among older, less educated, and less affluent populations, as well as in rural parts of the country that tend to have fewer choices and slower [internet] connections.” Just a year ago, Atoms America and Bits America seemed to be split in ways that were mostly tangible—technology access, age, geography. Now the divide seems to be ideological. Atoms and Bits are choosing sides and getting ready to fight. If that doesn’t change—if our leaders can’t get us past that—somebody’s going to launch a missile. |
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Post by sloucho on Jun 3, 2016 16:12:07 GMT -5
Republicans are the party of big business. They designed NAFTA, and Clinton signed it. This has really lead to the lack of living wage jobs. Trump, if he gets in, will do nothing. Hillary would probably want to expand on NAFTA, so, which one is the lesser evil?
It all goes back to our president being a role model with all the media dedicated to politics now. Back when the country was conceived, we didn't know anything about our leaders. Things are much different now, and instead of working on governing, their role is more and more setting an example for the next generation.
Can you imagine everybody going around acting like Donald Trump? What a joke America would be to the world.
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Post by psuhistory on Jun 4, 2016 10:16:07 GMT -5
I thought this was pretty interesting and I have a hard time disagreeing with any of it. The general view of technology and political economy is persuasive, it's a great metaphor--though "atoms and bits" brings cat food commercials to mind, which is distracting. I also think the society is too big for its major divides and conflicts to be explained in terms of any one factor. In my patch, the local society and economy were largely insulated from change by the university, and unemployment, to take one aspect of the crisis, never reached the levels of otherwise similar Pennsylvania counties. In this part of the US, the current environment tends to mobilize much older fears and hatreds, and political polarization maps more easily on traditional patterns of populist politics... "There are older and fouler things than orcs in the deep places of the world." Tolkien |
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Post by tnredsfan on Jun 4, 2016 21:21:14 GMT -5
The general consensus amongst economists, conservative and liberal, is that free trade is good for the economy - i.e. there are benefits and drawbacks, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. And the drawbacks are that a lot of Americans have lost their jobs, and although they may be working again now, the pay isn't as good, the benefits aren't as good, and infinitesimal interest rates mean it's impossible for anyone living paycheck to paycheck to build any kind of lasting wealth or even a personal safety net. As recently as the 80's, you could take a thousand bucks and put it in a savings account and leave it alone, with compound interest at around 5%, when your kid was born, and by the time he/she was ready for college, you'd have a nice chunk of change there. Doesn't work that way anymore. Working hard is well and good; working hard when you're not working TOWARD anything generates anger, resentment, bitterness, and that's what I think we're seeing in a lot of Trump (and Sanders) supporters.
The "atoms and bits" thing was a good read. Thanks for posting it, Lark. I agree with you: I don't think the transgender bathroom laws and similar things are connected to the bits/atoms battle. Just a different cultural divide. Southern Evangelicals were dealt a severe defeat when gay marriage became the law of the land nationwide, and what's going on in North Carolina (and here in Tennessee) is simply a GOP-dominated legislature feeding red meat to their respective bases.
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Post by sloucho on Jun 5, 2016 15:27:42 GMT -5
I can't agree with the way certain "American" businesses or otherwise, have used foreign labor, basically corporate slavery, in other countries, and say that it is good for the outlook of mankind. I know this is just a transitional period in history as far as doing global business goes, but the right in the most powerful country in the world right now have made it easier to take advantage of the not so well off from birth, by giving them jobs that are in horrible working conditions and paying them 1/5th the living wage.
It all goes back to about the 17th century with the industrial revolution, and is the reason for our immigration to the US. The businessman will tell himself that it trickles down eventually, but when it comes down to it, when does a person have more money than he needs? Is it a million dollars? Is it 10 billion? Why would you want to worry about people stealing your cash if you gave your wealth away through income distribution. I guess they want to keep government regulations down by not paying their taxes and put the money where they decide. It doesn't distibute wealth properly, if you believe in helping mankind.
It's been that way since mankind has had trade, so, it is transitional, but, in my lifetime though, I would like people to overcome this somehow. Technology is helping, but business interests are so stringent on keeping power. I watch CNBC sometimes, and wonder, what the heck are these people doing?
If there were worldwide business ethics that they could somehow enforce, the world would have less poverty and therefore less violence. But, that may take 2000 years.
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Post by psuhistory on Jun 5, 2016 16:00:11 GMT -5
I can't agree with the way certain "American" businesses or otherwise, have used foreign labor, basically corporate slavery, in other countries, and say that it is good for the outlook of mankind. If there were worldwide business ethics that they could somehow enforce, the world would have less poverty and therefore less violence. But, that may take 2000 years. Since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, changes related to social justice have resulted from political organization, not from changes in ethics. It has come more from the bottom up in the West than from the top down. I doubt that it will take 2,000 years for factory workers in these other societies to organize, and to increase the price of their work, but it's not a process that any multinational corporation is interested in promoting... |
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Post by sloucho on Jun 5, 2016 17:01:56 GMT -5
I can't agree with the way certain "American" businesses or otherwise, have used foreign labor, basically corporate slavery, in other countries, and say that it is good for the outlook of mankind. If there were worldwide business ethics that they could somehow enforce, the world would have less poverty and therefore less violence. But, that may take 2000 years. Since the second quarter of the nineteenth century, changes related to social justice have resulted from political organization, not from changes in ethics. It has come more from the bottom up in the West than from the top down. I doubt that it will take 2,000 years for factory workers in these other societies to organize, and to increase the price of their work, but it's not a process that any multinational corporation is interested in promoting... That is why I like what Sanders is selling. I say that it may take another couple of thousand years to inevitably even out globally. When we are all living on top of each other. Clinton and NAFTA was well meaning, but poverty is the main fuel for violence, and businesses have definitely abused NAFTA and trade in general, which was probably expected when it was drafted. Average citizens of the US are starting to realize this, and are trying to lay the blame on Republican or Democrat. Our effectiveness as a global leader is compromised by this finger pointing. Someday, hopefully in my lifetime, they will come to some agreement on a living wage index in every country, and make businesses pay that much to operate there. Eventually, with that kind of regulation, poverty and eventually violence would wane. Hopefully, Clinton will try and do something globally about poverty, first here, and then around the world. I don't see her as the type of person that would do anything with her business influences. I haven't heard her do anything but attack Trump. It's just frustrating. I think the last 40 years, businesses have been running amuck, especially the oil conglomerates, and that is the reason that the conservative movement is coming to an end. Technology is just too good about letting people know what is going on like never before. Print books were a way of letting people know what was going on, but now, it's exponentially more efficient. Again, just a transitional period, but you got to do what you can while you are here to help mankind, IMO. Some people just don't care. |
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