The Legislature Is In Session
The day care center for the delusional and deranged known as the Florida Legislature is open in Tallahassee for the next two months to see how much more can be looted for business interests and how dangerous they can make the state for visitors and residents.
There will be new giveaways to commercial interests that never generate permanent jobs or tax income for the state, new guns laws to terrorize even more people, new restrictions on voters who don’t support the Republican Party, and new obstacles for women seeking to make their own decisions. That is always the plan and goal of the legislature.
Anyone who thinks the voters can throw these clowns out hasn’t studies the creative redistricting maps they have created to prevent it.
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Two months a year, during all they have to do is pass a budget, and they still manage to screw up the state.
I have little faith in either political party to do what is right for the people they represent. Simply, there is too much money involved with elections and politicians are bought long before the time to make laws come around.
Corporations are having a heyday at the expense of the economy. Finding jobs has never been this bad since back in the days of the Great Depression. Corporations aren’t doing bad at all. They are sitting on record profits. Senior management salaries and benefits are through the ceiling.
What’s going to kill all this is that one corporation’s employees are another’s customers. If one corporation isn’t paying it’s employees enough beyond a wage to just pay living expenses, then something goes unbought after necessities are taken care of and that is where we are today. This Great Recession as they want to call it, has been the longest in our history, bar none and that includes the Great Depression.
So politicians are going where the money is because it takes a lot of money just to get beat in politics today. Of course that money wants something before they will let it go.
Hence our representatives wonderful examples of how to govern.
Money talks and duty and responsibility walks. MalWart is a prime example of corporate stupidity. They don’t pay their employees enough for them to be able to shop at their stores, even with their so-called employee discount. If you turn your own employees into customers for even lower cost products, you are going to lose money, and MalWart is losing money, and has been for several quarters.
Henry Ford figured that out more than a century ago and paid his workers well, not out of the goodness of his heart, but for the enrichment of his profits.
Today failed CEOs make million when they are fired for destroying the corporations they ran, but they actual productive workers are treated like dirt.
We are going nowhere fast because of a lack of demand, but the government keeps shoveling money at the supply side of the system. Business don’t hire workers unless there is a demand for what those workers will create. No demand, no new workers – it’s that simple. Apparently that fundamental rule of capitalism is too difficult for CEOs and politicians to understand.
If you want to create jobs, give money to the people on the bottom – they’ll spend it because they can’t afford to save it.
We have something else on the horizon I’ve been talking about for a couple of years. Notice that there has been a steady cut in employees but the productivity of those same employees was going through the roof. Sadly, decreasing the pay does not promote higher work output. The last three years has seen a reverse of this trend.
There are outside forces that no one is planning on yet that is fixing to tear up employment in the years coming. By 2025, it could effect as much as 40% or so of the entire US employment picture. Those that have jobs now will be those threatened with loosing them. It’s called automation and the rapid advance in technology for vision systems/recognition/calculation systems are starting to come out of the lab and into the market. I don’t think white collar workers yet understand what is fixing to hit the job market over the years coming and it is their jobs that are going to be up for grabs.
Corporations will do what they have been doing already for the last 20 years or so. They will shed workers and replace them with software/mechanical. After all the bot doesn’t need sleep, time off, a pay raise, nor sick benefits.
Take today’s political scene following where the money is and insert it in that picture and see what you think will come of it.
It isn’t new. I think I mentioned Bryan some time ago that one of the reasons I resigned from a successful high-paying R&D job was because companies willfully refused to use the machinery my team designed for what they were designed to do (with some notable exceptions). They were designed to make production (factory) jobs easier and safer for the workers. The CNC machines we created were designed to increase efficiency, to minimise wastage, and shorten the time it took to complete a job. Sadly, they also required fewer people to operate. We created them to provide such a short ROI (return on investment, which was in most cases 7-9 Months rather than the 1.5-2 years previously) that there would be no need to sacrifice staff, as they could afford to buy more machines to provide more product, and not only keep the staff they had, but increase them over time. Unfortunately, most (particularly US customers, but some EU and Asian also) saw it as a way to cut their immediate overheads & increase short-term profits by reducing staff, others saw it as a way to pay for the cost of the machine. Where they once needed 5, they now needed only 2. And almost all of these also increased the cost of the goods because the quality increased, even though the actual cost of manufacture actually decreased significantly.
So, I gave up. I realised that greed and stupidity would always win. *shrug* Pretty much everything that has happened the past 20 years, I saw coming. And it will get worse.
The funny thing about automation, when you think about it, is that the easiest job to give to an ‘expert system’ is CEO. There’s all kinds of data available on successful strategies, and it isn’t that difficult to find one that fits a corporation’s profile and the economic conditions. The CEO doesn’t actually have a supervisory responsibilities, and isn’t held responsible for anything else. Replacing the CEO with a computer program would save a lot more money than a factory floor’s worth of workers.
…and that is going to come.
One of the big problems with CEOs is that the very best personality for a corporate CEO is that of the psychopath. You want to know why corporations are so screwed up when it comes to people vs business decisions, you’re lookin’ at it.
Sorry but I have no great respect for the average corporation any more than most politicians. As always the decisions corporate takes are almost universally short sighted and short termed.
It didn’t used to be that way. Corporations used to plan for the future building something that would last forever, but today they can’t see beyond the next quarter. The CEOs seem to think that stocks are the only thing the corporation sells, and the only thing that is important.
What drives corporate decisions and has for years now is the combination of Wall Street’s slogan of “What have you done for me today” and the CEO’s desire of a golden parachute and benefits still being there. In order for the CEO to show his effectiveness, that’s short term gains.
More and more I see a very common link between today’s realities and those of the Great Depression. In the last month or two we’ve had at least 3 bankers bailing off multistory roofs in Europe/UK. This was the hallmark of Black Friday in the US at the on set of the stock market crash.
We’re facing a similar upheaval as what was seen in the changing from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age as we now strongly enter into the Information Age. During the former, labor requirements went from around 90% or the workforce (this number varies depending on your source) to 2% with the insertion of mechanical aids to farming.
There are no meaningful numbers in yet on what the digital revolution has done to the working populace other than you can be sure that according to the offical numbers it is far less than reality shows it to be. Changing the measuring stick only changes the reported numbers in an attempt to make it not look so bad, it doesn’t change reality.
The Reagan Administration changed the study used for the official unemployment rate, so people wouldn’t figure out how badly the economy was doing, and no one has bothered to change it back.
The problem with the current economy is that the US has been leaving manufacturing, sending it overseas. That means we aren’t creating any real assets, tangible things with inherent value, most assets only exist on a spreadsheet. When you have to import the products that people use, you really have nothing to sell to the rest of the world. It is a suicidal attitude.
What the US has been pushing to replace manufacturing is more corporate idiocy. IP strengthening is one of them. Drug IPs and patents are another. The problem is that jobs are being exported overseas as you say, leaving behind minimum wage service jobs that can’t be exported such as Reagan’s “hamburger technician” or ditch digging. Neither job pays enough to live on.
These drug makers are in for a big fall one day coming, right along with health care costs. Neither are really payable by the average citizen for a lengthy stay in a hospital. The costs are continuing to rise with no checks in the process. There is too much of the GNP being eaten by health care and various other money grabs. There does reach a ceiling where no one will or can pay, including insurance companies.
But as you say the real issue is that all the jobs were allowed to be sent overseas and the workers abandoned to their own devices. It looks to lead to a major crash sometime in the future as the debt is unplayable as it is now.
If the Federal Reserve would allow some more inflation in something other than health care costs and food, and the minimum wage is raised, the collapse can be kicked down the road. With two-thirds of GNP based on consumer spending and consumers getting poorer, the debt is going to rise. Actually the national debt isn’t very important because the debt is in dollars and we can print as much as we need. The real debt crisis is consumer debt. Consumers can’t print money, like the government, they have to earn it, and you won’t earn enough to cover basic expenses, much less pay down your debt at $7.15/hour and no benefits.
IP has been so perverted from its original intent of promoting creativity in the Constitution to be unrecognizable, and the media moguls, et al. are making it worse all the time.
Yes, I agree. When I worked for HP during the 90’s, I was assistant PM for a big installation for a big pharmaceutical company. We were there for Months. Above ground, the facility doesn’t look like much, just a quite large parkland type area with a couple buildings in the distance, surrounded by a double chain-link, razor wire topped fence, with a single entrance/exit double gate with a guardhouse and up to 6 (very serious) guards. Once you are inside the complex, it’s like holiday land! There was a large (man made) lake with an island where you can picnic, you can fish, swim, kayak etc. There is a sports oval, tennis courts, meticulous 9 hole golf course… Inside, there is a restaurant (they call it the canteen, but trust me, it’s a 4 star restaurant)! A gym, spa, sauna, squash court, indoor cricket… you get the idea! They also have one of the most modern medical facilities I’ve seen. The main building is three story (above ground) and covers a large area. Below ground, it goes for several stores, with the last few accessible only by a few who don’t work there with some very serious security, the like of which I’ve only seen once on a high security area of a Military base that housed DSD (or ASD as they are now known). There, they do the kind of research that most Aussies would be horrified to know about on the outskirts of suburbia. It’s the kind of stuff you’d want to be in the middle of the Arctic (or Antarctic) or preferable, another planet. And I learned that they have cures for some illnesses, but it’s not economically viable for them to release them yet. Not until the numbers of the ill increase significantly, and long term viability of the product is ensured. And I learned other things there that worried me more than things I learned in my time in Mil/Int.
The system HP (specially) designed for them was to increase automation of research and production, and for data storage & fast retrieval. It also had some specially designed *expert systems*, and the system worked very well. They used to have several assistants for each Scientist & Engineer, and the numbers were more than halved after the system was installed, and production was increased. Part of the reason for the system wasn’t actually to improve efficiency. It was for their security. The fewer people who know what actually goes on there, the less likely someone will *leak* (sic). Though, they have some very effective ways to stop people leaking info! There is a good reason why people don’t hear mach bad press about the big pharmaceutical companies. 😉 😀
I saw similar things in other companies I contracted for between ’90 & ’05.
knowledge is a double-edged sword.
The biggest problem I have with expert systems is that they get their information from sources that believe that some things are impossible. If people don’t know that these problems are ‘impossible’, they might find a way of doing them. Like all data bases, they are no better than the data they contain, and can’t really learn. They are very useful, but they lack the ability to think heuristically and to be creative. They provide an answer to the question they are asked, but have no way of knowing if that was the right question.
Real experts are the experienced people who can figure out what people actually need to know from the question that was asked – can give them the information they need, rather than simply answering the question that was asked. Expert systems are extremely useful, but they are certainly not perfect.
Kaiser Permanente has been working on probably the world’s best health care expert system for ages. They’re HQ’ed here in California so have access to the best software engineers on the planet, and it shows — their expert system in most cases provides a better diagnosis than their doctors do. In fact, their doctors are trained to use the expert system as their first line of diagnostic questioning and to use its results as their first guess at what’s wrong with the patient.
Then there are those cases where the expert system is stymied, or produces results that clearly are incorrect (perhaps the patient mis-reported her symptoms either through ignorance or embarrassment, or maybe there just isn’t enough information in the system). That’s where the human doctor comes in, to figure out what’s going on and provide additional information to train the expert system.
Having worked in this field for a long time, I don’t see an expert system replacing a human doctor anytime soon, even though they’re getting surprisingly good. K-P is probably getting better results with this approach than anybody else in health care because of their ability to closely supervise and monitor their doctors (who are all full-time salaried employees, not independent contractors), and even they don’t see any possibility of doctors being replaced by expert systems anytime within the few decades. It might let them use nurse practitioners more heavily on the front line, but they’re still going to need doctors.
From personal experience I know that the system used by KMart pharmacies to check for drug conflicts is better than any of my Mother’s doctors, or the PDR.
Expert systems have better memories than doctors, and access to more resources, but GIGO produces the same results for computers or systems. There have to be a lot of people who die every year because they don’t tell the doctor about ‘some minor problem’ that turns out to be fatal.
Yes, K-P has a solid system, and there are a few others around, but most practices have gone corporate and are ‘reducing expenses’ to pay for the clerical staff to deal with insurance companies. They aren’t investing in new technology to improve health care, only in new technology to deal with the insurance companies.