Charles Koch vows to hold Republicans accountable

Patience please.

Bilateral trade deals are in process to develop fair trade. You seem to think the President agrees with you. He does not. His efforts are to negotiate with trade pardners to facilitate more equitable dealings.

It’s possible that the trade with Taiwan is so small or the volume so slight that ite will not be soon. The big pardenrs with the largest volumes are first and the little guys will come later.

Re: What happened to our jobs over the past four decades...

Cheap foreign labor is yesterday’s problem.

Over the next four decades, AI and robotics are going to replace cheap labor of every kind - and most of the middle class, too.

My Prediction - a universal minimum income is the only way we can maintain peace in the streets.

The Good News - unlike human beings, machines and processes are infinitely perfectible.

If we have thousands of machines that can do the same work as millions of human beings, the standard of living for even the poorest people will continue to rise every decade.

"Over the next four decades, AI and robotics are going to replace cheap labor of every kind - and most of the middle class, too."

Is a CNC machine a "robot?" Or...a conveyor? What's so new about conveyors? CNC burners (duographs or lasers)?

I've done steel work from expediting, to cutting, burning, fabrication, machining (including custom) and assembly. I've done lower level programming and played with robotics, too.

On robotics and AI, we've been seeing a wash of propaganda. I saw the old tape CNC machines (new back then) sitting idle for years, even though they weren't hard to punch out and set up. Why? Because managers didn't want anyone doing anything there that management couldn't understand (vanity, control).

Those machines also developed backlash and other looseness. Looseness from wear needs to be compensated for in setups. Tools needed to be replaced often, as with the manual lathes, mills, etc. There are also custom jobs that require much more frequent setups of many different kinds.

There are cost, regulatory and other limits on natural resources. Conveyors, fixtures and many other many other machines require frequent adjustments and wear quickly.

Artificial scarcity and planned obsolescence will continue. The costs for most such machines are far higher than costs for human labor and begin with big debts.

Open source designs and small shops will cut the mega-corporates' designs on population control down to size. Western culture people will fight, if necessary to retain remaining rights against regulatory crackdowns from globalists and have retained more ingenuity than the globalists had imagined.

Look at the management problems in software and what that industry has been reduced to (bloatacious crapware, mostly offshoring, etc., due to PC personnel practices).

Most likely, the plan from globalists is to continue the propaganda blitz while having foreign, communist slave labor do the real work until those foreign communist nations launch nukes at us. Then, as they have telegraphed in so many ways, they hope to be in their hugely stocked hidey holes surrounded by slave security guards, hoping that the rest of the population will be exterminated. Their fantasies continue with a post-war, environmentalist paradise, where they'll frolic and talk with the animals.

Re: “On robotics and AI, we've been seeing a wash of propaganda.”

Revolutionary technology always takes at least ten years longer than advertised.

For the last three decades, America has had a massive over supply of low skill and medium skill labor. There has been very little financial incentive to invest in automation and AI since manufacturers can in-source and out-source cheap labor any time they want.

Last week I watched a guy on CNBC claim there is shortage of 500,000 welders in the USA. Get real. That means at least $50 billion of industrial orders have gone unfilled. If that market actually existed, there would be hundreds of start-up companies developing labor saving welding devices.

The only reason there is a “shortage” of welders is because American companies want the tax payers to train them first, and subsidize them second.

Every work day, there are hundreds of new businesses created in America based solely on the fact that we import 1.5 million low-to-medium skill LEGAL immigrants EVERY year.

That era is going to come to a screeching halt in the 2020s.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.