American Politics Discussion Thread

[Mjmd]

Higher education requirement positions also tend to be concentrated in urban areas. Highly educated people also tend to vote democrat in larger numbers. To avoid ad hominem I will stop there.

[Mjmd]

Just to try to stay focused. An example would be immigration. More educated people may know that historically racist fear and hate have been used to flame fervor to keep people / a party in political power. Even more educated people may know this is a tactic especially used by those who need to prop themselves up because they don't have actual solutions. I'll also say urban areas also have the advantage of actually interacting people who are different than you. Its hard to hate people you've actually met ( I personally think interracial pot lucks / parties would be a great solution to help bridge the "other". But maybe that is my midwest side coming through)

[Boro]

What kind of work are those higher educated people engaged in though? I can hardly imagine they go for higher education to operate steel milling machines, or to plow fields, or to create IV packages 8 hours a day, or to handle oil rigs.

My grandfather's youngest sibling worked in a metal factory all his life, and needed both of his shoulder joints replaced because they were completely worn out. This isnt the kind of life people think about when deciding what education to pursue.

A shorter version of this is "every successful ecosystem attracts parasites." It's the parasites that constitute the numbers to vote blue, not the engines of economic success. It's a thousand barnacles outvoting the one whale they're attached to.

[...]

Yes, there can be different definitions of productivity, but the distinctions aren't really important for the points I'm making. Any definition will have net-positive producers and net-negative consumers. By and large they'll have mostly similar overlap, even if a few percent of the details differ.

It is when we try to find the root cause and actually solve the problem. Why work your hands to the bone when you can try becoming a barnacle instead? Why work as a baker for Lidl in Budapest when you can work as the same baker for Lidl just over the border in vienna for 4x as much money? Same issue with medicals. They have been and are siphoned to western europe ever since we opened the borders.

[Ginger()]

Are you going to try and stop your medical from leaving? Keep them in a cage? Maybe build a wall?
If you want people to stay and work for your town or area, maybe you should pay them more, instead of guilt tripping them for filling the greater demand elsewhere and ensuring their family’s prosperity.

Also not quite sure what your argument about steel workers and higher education is supposed to mean, just because there do exist economically productive occupations that don’t require higher ed doesn’t disprove that higher education requirements are dominant in the highest value-added industries. People don’t shell out thousands of dollars and years of their life for social status and a piece of paper, they do it because that education allows them to bring more value to their employers and subsequently receive more in compensation

[Boro]

yeah pay them more its just that easy right? and where are we supposed to get the money from? magic printers like you and ballooning debt that will never be repaid? seriously?

I'm talking about steel workers, paper workers (paper industry from toilet to drawing paper, to dossier paper, letterboxes etc.), any productive industry that produces real, tangible products. Real economy if you prefer. Energy generation-wise I suppose Nuclear and dam power plants require a higher portion of high level education, but thats it.

But I think you can tell me then what are the highest value-added industries and what they produce.

[Mjmd]

Engineers probably.

I always get the sense when these kinds of conversation happen that people just forget about technology for some reason? People always forget the US has lost far more jobs to automation than the jobs moving overseas. There are engineers who design the machines, engineers who design the factories (I knew one of these; super interesting), engineers who design the software to operate the machines. Then you layer on all the supporting roles like marketing, HR, and finance. All of these are educated roles. This supporting infrastructure then requires even more support usually in the form of various IT. Both direct support but also even more software. When people think "service economy" they think burger flippers, but a lot of the "services" are  in the technical sphere. Mind you all the service companies again have their various departments. I work for a ' service' company in the HR field that also develops its own software. Probably 700/800 employees are educated.

Even things like the machine operators may need an education as a lot of production machines are programmable (my wife was looking into for a while).

Things that didn't used to require an education may now because technology has advanced. I had a grandfather that worked a local town mechanic out of high school. He passed the business down to my uncle. My uncle had  to sell it because cars are so complicated now, require special machines he couldn't afford for their diagnosis, and they could source parts easier and cheaper. My wife's cousin had to do 2 years to be a mechanic for ONE car brand and has to do continuous education for.

[Boro]

Supporting infrastructure of the supporting infrastructure of the supporting infrastructure yes. Sounds like a really convoluted way to say barnacle. I don't know how it sounds in english, but we do say that bureaucracy always justifies the need for even larger bureaucracy.

And I'm not even looking at cooks, or burger flippers if you prefer, but something like a company that offers attendance sheet framework service, but refuses to have a default attendance time for each worker, so every day an hour or more has to be spent per 80 employees (we have over 10k) just to have the attendance sheets done for the day, thanks to the whole thing being done on a remote server and handled through a web UI. Then this requires office workers set aside to handle this load and so on instead of actually meaningful work that improves working conditions/production etc.

And yes I can now write specialized macro/software that through a web browser can input this data error-free at least because otherwise this 240 different inputs would be ridden with errors.

And no, we cant have workers access their own sheets and log each themselves like when it was on paper.

Pure barnacle life.

Pure unproductive work and I get a headache every time I do it because its so pointless. If I had the option to be healthy (I mean, the whole "my body my choice" doesnt apply to born-sick people. We just dont get a choice.) I'd rather chop wood with an axe or work at a sawmill. It's a thousand times more rewarding to look at a pile of wood I went through and feel my muscles than look at the screen and get reminded of the idiocy that needlessly convolutes the attendance sheet process.

Edit because I forgot to address the car example: Convoluting car designs is part of the goal in order to monopolize service and profits from it. its analogous to the bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy example.

[Mjmd]

There is probably a better program to handle the attendance time. Its just if your company A) knows it exists and B) is willing to pay for it.
I'm sure manual time cards and payroll process was very effective and never produced errors at all....... From an accounting prospective studying auditing I know there a whole boat load of audit risks to manual time cards .

A lot of the tough part about modern car design and maintenance is they all have computers in them.

I agree there is a certain reward to actually making something with your hands. I'm an accountant for instance, but I love making maple syrup, which requires a whole boat load of work (both at the time and in wood chopping).

The truth is that manual hand labor just can't compete with machines though in a lot of industries. Most sawmills are highly mechanized. The jobs that are highly manual are the ones that quickly get outsourced to cheap labor markets.

[Boro]

Mmhm, which is why so many consumer products, mechanization or not, get stamped with "made in china", instead of made in usa, made in germany, etc.

[Mjmd]

China has developed an industrial base. It isn't just a manual sweatshop anymore. Believe it or not countries can develop industries and educate their workers. I imagine the number of industrial engineers in China has skyrocked in the past 20 years. However, there is a reason your shirt you are wearing is probably made somewhere else in SE Asia and not China anymore.