U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People

New York Times ^ | SEPTEMBER 19, 2013 | STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

[ExSES]

While automation means less jobs, someone is earning and spending. The trick is for the people who lose jobs to automation to learn to maintain and service the machines or find something else that people still want or even prefer to have done by hand.

Like you say, the "Trick" is for those who lose those jobs to retrain at higher skill levels. Unfortunately, many do not ever do this due to lake of ambition or, in many cases lack of innate ability/intelligence!

The sad fact is, as technological advances make life better, they also continiously reduce the number of active producers due to ever-increasing skill set demands!

50 years ago I had a "Futurist" professor who lectured on this trend. Being a consummate liberal/dreamer, he envisioned a population free to engage in the arts and "think deep thoughts", I spoke up at the time that human nature would dictate an ever more decadent and dangerous populace since vices are far more attractive to the vast majority of humans than are higher aspirations! Most of my fellow students (with the guts to speak up) agreed with me.

BTW, I got an A in the course as the professor was (rare today) open to debate on his views!

[Cringing Negativism Network]

Thanks.

Not sure what to say about this.

Interesting anyway. Would like to see a more clearly defined trend.

[angry elephant]

In the 90s when there were a lot of video stores that rented movies, I commented that it will be nice if folks could just go to a slot machine and rent movies.

Now we have Red Box and video streaming, so those stores have been replaced. Fine for some products, but it seems like for fast food, where one of the few adjuncts to flavor is that is cooked reasonable close to the time of sale and is warmish that a vending machine would strip any of its attributes out.