So you're saying that each of the FTE robot builders make many robots, not just one?
[NA] Practical tariff impact
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EdFred
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I don't know of a single company that makes only 1 single item and then does nothing, closes their doors, and says, welp, that's it, good job boys, we put 3 welders out of work. Of course they make more than one robot, along with other products. You don't have to pay health insurance, PTO, FMLA, or workmans comp on a robot. So even if that robot costs slightly more than the wage of that person it replaces, the company that bought it is ahead.
Good then, I think we're on the same page and agree that automation displaces more people than it creates in new jobs. Which, again to pop back to the beginning statement, seems obvious or the cost of the automation would be larger than the cost of the labor it displaces.
pfarber
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Unless I see some numbers I don't believe the tariff is a huge deal.
Most products see a 100% increase at each step in the chain. Manufacturer makes a widget and sells to the wholesaler for $10 who then sells it to a business for $20 and that business sell it to the public for $30 or more.
If you're talking medical then add a x10 multiplier. Aviation same. I know for a fact that my old doctor could get a blood glucose test done for $8. My new 'chain' doctor charges ME $50 for the draw, $40 for the appointment, and $85 for the test. Of course insurance gets billed over $300 also). They did an AIC (blood strip test) at the office for $54. I can buy the machine, 100 strips, 100 lancets for $25 on Amazon.
The scare tactics in the news are untruthful. We pay way to much because of the profits (I will not say greed, but profits) being extracted by the business.
So unless I can see some actual invoices and balance sheets, I will not believe the scare mongering.
I will add in the hidden cost of ridiculous government regulations. And those regulations are mostly imposed by special interest (like insurance companies, injury lawyers etc) that add to the cost to protect THEIR bottom line. Don't get me started about homeowners insurance and BS they come up with.
I'll end with this last example. My roomba had a motor error. Roomba charges $60 for a new motor. I bought the motor on Aliexpress for $8 delivered.
www.irobot.com
Most products see a 100% increase at each step in the chain. Manufacturer makes a widget and sells to the wholesaler for $10 who then sells it to a business for $20 and that business sell it to the public for $30 or more.
If you're talking medical then add a x10 multiplier. Aviation same. I know for a fact that my old doctor could get a blood glucose test done for $8. My new 'chain' doctor charges ME $50 for the draw, $40 for the appointment, and $85 for the test. Of course insurance gets billed over $300 also). They did an AIC (blood strip test) at the office for $54. I can buy the machine, 100 strips, 100 lancets for $25 on Amazon.
The scare tactics in the news are untruthful. We pay way to much because of the profits (I will not say greed, but profits) being extracted by the business.
So unless I can see some actual invoices and balance sheets, I will not believe the scare mongering.
I will add in the hidden cost of ridiculous government regulations. And those regulations are mostly imposed by special interest (like insurance companies, injury lawyers etc) that add to the cost to protect THEIR bottom line. Don't get me started about homeowners insurance and BS they come up with.
I'll end with this last example. My roomba had a motor error. Roomba charges $60 for a new motor. I bought the motor on Aliexpress for $8 delivered.
Roomba® Cleaning Head Module - i3 & j7 Series | iRobot®
Shop Cleaning Head Module for Roomba® e, i & select j Series Robots today and get free two day shipping.
www.irobot.com
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EdFred
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We do not agree. It MAY, but it is not guaranteed. The jobs it replaces are probably overpaid (union) jobs. A cost savings companies replacing workers does not mean it costs that much to the company building robots. Each job is not equal in pay, so the number of jobs it replaces could be less than the jobs created, but the created jobs may be paid less than the jobs eliminated.
Ed Haywood
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No, that's just completely wrong. What automation does is free people up to do more productive work by making workers more efficient. That raises the overall standard of living of society by increasing our collective capacity to produce more goods and services.
The reason we have boats, planes, iPhones, vacations, and cable TV is because of automation. 200 years ago it took almost our entire capability to feed, clothe, and house our population. Because of automation, we now have massive excess productive capacity to meet our needs and produce stuff we want.
You are literally arguing against the industrial revolution.
Tell that to the blue collar workers that are no longer employable because they lack the ability to work modern jobs.
Nah. I'm arguing that automation displaces workers, will continue to do so and will sometime in the next generation or three replace the need for 70-90% of human labor. I'm arguing that the industrial revolution will continue into a technological revolution that is already making some classes of human labor less needed. And, most importantly, that the global economy has the wrong system of incentives and rewards for this reality.
I mean, it's 2025. You can't seriously be taking a position that the steady increase of automation, robotics and AI is going to be a job creator over the coming generations?
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For arguments sake, lets define automation. Is automation a cnc plasma cutter or any cnc mill? Before cnc mills there were bridgeports. Before those machines people would manually create complex parts or shapes, but it wont be as accurate, fast, or cost effective.
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I am a blue collar employer. I will argue that part of the move towards more automation is the difficulty in finding skilled labor. Its been a societal shift and I have to figure out better more efficient ways to do the work. It just so happens the machines im acquiring do a better job. And Im able to do more with the same labor force. Adapt and move forward or die. If youre content sweeping floors in a factory and unwilling to figure out what else you might be able to do. Its not on automation when youre replace by the industrial version of a roomba. Theres a mechanic somewhere that's getting more work to fix that roomba and a company somewhere employing more people to make it.
I will be willing to bet your argument for the difficulty in finding GOOD fabricators is pay. Welders are easy to find. But there is a huge leap from welder to fabricator.
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Sorry to hear of your fate...
My father was in the furniture business... AAMOF he was one of the first disturbers of Børge Mogensen when they wanted to break into the US market..and could have become their NA distributor if he wanted.. He had a furniture store outside of Philadelphia and survived the onslaught of the recession in the mid 70s, the likes of Levitz, Bruner's, and other department store discounters in the 80 while scraping enough of a living to let us live in a pretty nice area, pay for three kids to go to the Ivy League (not me - I'm normal), and keep five people employed.
Can't tell you how many times I went to the Spring and Fall market in High Point, NC... because I was normal my father was hoping I would take over the business... but the beaches of Southern California had my calling, so as a young man I went west.. He ended up selling it to a guy that converted it into an Ethan Allen franchise store.
So... where am I taking this... and not to be political, but when China started to import into the US, how many US furniture companies went out of business? Look how fast Broyhill sank... How many people in North Carolina and the surrounding states lost their jobs due the cutback in production. Yes, NC is still up and running but with way lower numbers. Maybe this will be the shot in the arm to get it back to where it was in the 80s if not the 90's in production volume. With a lot of automation, you may not need as many employees, but you will need some skilled employees. In counter point, some that did survive did so by importing and distributing - Bernhardt being an example.
I am looking at tariff thing as though it has a double edge blade... there is some good that may come of it, and there are some downsides.
flyingcheesehead
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Won't matter if you're trying to sell something that's 10x more expensive. That puts you solely in the "luxury" market which is very small. You're not gonna sell much. Even the richest guy in Bangladesh isn't going to buy your product...
I think quality would have gone to crap anyway. Profit is what drives capitalism, and anything they can do to increase profits is going to be done.
In fact, cheap labor has probably kept quality UP by keeping the MBAs focused on the biggest cost, instead of making parts use less raw material and fewer assembly steps... But either way, companies are going to try their very best to ensure that their products usually last through the warranty period and no more. What percentage have to make it through the warranty depends on how expensive they are to support.
Exactly.
Or, we say that UBI will be the end of the world, we do nothing, and we get caught with our pants down when inevitably 80% of our workforce is unemployed and on food stamps and welfare which looks a lot like UBI. The only difference is that UBI would benefit the people who do work as well instead of paying people to not work. And by providing for basic needs, it would allow a bunch of new small businesses to start up.
Not really:
Maybe, eventually, but probably not.
If we look at computers, they got rid of a lot of people who used to do typing, filing, etc right off the bat. It created new jobs in making and supporting computers, but not nearly as many as it displaced. Then there were "data entry clerks" who would type all of the stuff into computers and so we got some more jobs back for a while, but that doesn't exist any more either because everything goes straight into the computer or is read via OCR now. Different jobs did come along eventually as computers expanded into areas that weren't possible with humans before.
I'm not sure whether computers have been a net job creator or not, but I don't think a robot that welds, for example, would be; I'm not sure whether a general purpose robot would have quite the same effect as a general purpose computer, but who knows.
I call BS. When you don't have to have a job out of necessity, you can do a "job" that brings you great satisfaction that doesn't have to bring you a paycheck. That could be raising your kids. That could be volunteering at a charity. That could be creating and tending an amazing garden around your house, creating art in its various forms, or any number of other things.
If I didn't have to have a job, I could play music a lot more than I do (which is about once a week at best). I could finish a lot of projects that would make my house better. I could spend a ton more time with my family and I could teach my own kids. All of that would be FAR more satisfying and fulfilling than moving people and/or stuff from point A to B, or helping companies sell more crap, or doing IT stuff. And I could take off and run with some of the ideas I've had to create products and make money that way too - I simply don't have enough time for a family and a side gig right now, but there's a lot I could do if I didn't have to work for someone else.
There's no way it's that close at the end user. If there's only three robots, they won't need a full time maintenance position. Thirty, maybe. Three hundred, yes, probably more than one. Programmers, it depends how many widgets they make before switching to the next widget. And yes, the people designing and building the robots exist too... But all of those are likely higher paying jobs than the one the robots are replacing, and as has been stated already, if robots didn't save money we wouldn't use them, so I would be incredibly surprised if the net number of jobs created is more than half of what was replaced. It simply wouldn't make any economic sense at that point for the robots to exist.
This!
Totally fair. The term 'blue collar' is too broad to be useful for this discussion. I should have said unskilled labor. Which is all some people are capable of.
Nah. I have tons of retired friends. I don't have a single one that says, "man, I sure wish I had worked longer".
I'm sure there are some out there, but I don't know a single one.
There might be benefits to being busy or getting out of the house or having a social network. Traditional work does provide all of those to varying degrees. And I, even, mostly like my job. But there is a 100% chance I would find other ways to satisfy those needs in some fashion other than making my boss rich if I didn't need the money.
Sorry -- With respect I'm going to have to take the counter position to you guys.
I think you're able to say that because you've both had careers. Or you're referring to retired people who have worked for a long time and thus properly value their free time.
But what if all you had was free time your whole life?
Take the 18 year old you, just finished high school, and now you get a check every month to do nothing. And the thing is there's no end date. It's not a gap year, or a 5 gap years. It's just what you can expect forever. No one is going to ask anything of you, nothing is expected of you, no one is asking for you to produce or contribute anything. Frankly society doesn't care what you do or don't do. You wake up when you want, plan your day how you want, do only what you want. You have no time pressure at all.
Who do you think is going to deal well with such an unstructured life where it would require significant internal discipline to live in a healthy, purposeful way? Because I bet the people who would do best like that are your very smart, driven people. Incidentally, not those that are going to be recipients of UBI. But that's speculation.
Frankly, I think the best model is the sabbatical model. Every five years in your career take 12-18 months off. Enjoy yourself. Travel. Go flying. Volunteer. Spend a great year with your kids. Then go back to work and pick a new challenge. That way you don't backload all the things you want to do until you're retired. But that presupposes there is work to go back to. For a lot of the people who would utilize UBI, there is no work. It's just forever leisure time.
Not yet - Need to figure the cost of the robot per item of product to pay the people that built and maintain the robot. If the labor to produce and maintain the robot (or any tool) costs less than the labor to produce the product on a per item basis then cost of the item goes down. Another way of saying what Edfred said.
How the Cost of Light Fell by a Factor of 500,000
humanprogress.org
Brian
That. Would. Be. Amazing.
Wait, what? Why would my life be unstructured? I'm playing tennis mon/wed/fri. I'm hanging out with my friends interested geology a month or more every year in the canyons. I have time to read about any subject I want. I can hike around with my dogs.
Everyone will be the recipient of UBI at some point. Human labor will cease to have value soon. Whether soon is 25, 50 or 100 years is TBD, but the end of human labor is right around the corner. The assembly line was a hundred-ish years ago and was absolutely game changing in terms of the global economy. The robotics/AI revolution that we are about to enter will be no less game changing. As a global community, we can choose to by unburdened from the tyranny of work or we can choose to do unnecessary work. But it's a mistake to think that humans will be adding any economic value to the equation. The machines will be smarter, cheaper and better at our jobs than we are. And soon.
Stop talking dirty to me.
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Skilled labor and cheap labor are not the same thing. You can have one, you can have the other, but you can't have both.
I am a bit of a case study in this as I came into some passive income and bailed out of a decently paying but soul crushing programming job over a decade ago now. A lot of people told me I'd be miserable without a job and I can say without hesitation they were wrong. I was so miserable in my job that I was starting to feel physically ill and rotten(probably from sitting a desk all day with no exercise and minimal mental stimulation). I'd have to be desperate before ever going back to that. Now every now and then I daydream about what if I'd stayed in another 6mo or a year and put that extra money into another investment but that's pure fantasy. I was at my breaking point when I punched out- most people would have switched careers or jobs but I did what I did with zero regrets. I do still work in a sense, I have a small IT business going and do some odd jobs here and there on top of doing a whole bunch of labor intensive stuff that doesn't actually make money. Right now I'm working on a CPL with the aim of becoming a CFI and bringing in some avgas money but as far as anything like a regular structured day job- nope, never again. No interest, hated it, do not want to repeat.
I do not know why our culture has this idea that you should just be working all the time. Why would any sane person want to live like that? People in other countries take multi-month or even year sabbaticals all the time. Why should someone applying for job have to explain a "gap in their resume"? Why should that even be a negative thing? Sure, a person should pull their own weight and not be a drain on society but man the traditional employment model just isn't for everyone and most people don't live to work. We work to live.
Ed Haywood
Final Approach
You can in other countries. That's our problem.
Ed Haywood
Final Approach
First world problem. For much of human history, people worked to survive. If you didn't work, you starved.
pfarber
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The quality of a product is determined by the accounting and legal department, not the worker in China.
If you don't pay for inspection steps then expect poor quality.
Say Samsung is designing a new freezer. 100,000 units initial run. You can bet that they will use a lighter gauge metal to save money as you are talking hundreds of thousands of feet of material. Same for copper tubes and wires. If you can save $1 in metal per fridge that's $100,000 more profit you just made... and the worker in Shenzhen had NOTHING to do with it.
I worked on the Ford EV capacitor line at DENSO. If any part was dropped, it was scrapped, no questions asked. I personally put a few grand worth of MOSFET spacers in the trash one day. No one got in trouble. On a good day we made 300 units in 12 hours. Now ask why Denso was charging $8k per unit.
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Actually not so much. Farmers back in the olden days worked very hard during planting and harvest times but had long periods of relatively idle time between seasons. Hunter-gatherers did exactly that. This whole daily work routine is an industrial age invention and doesn't really make sense if you think about it. With our modern technology and productivity levels we should really be working less but instead we're working more.
cowtowner
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OK, I'm getting in here after the discussion on the actual question, to where y'all are discussing a lot of stuff going down a rabbit hole.
I own two companies that manufacture in Asia. Yes, I'm one of those capitalists that offshored production for profit.
How are the tariffs affecting me? Well, after the debate last summer I immediately added warehouse space and spent 100 days in asia bringing in enough inventory to weather the storm....or so I thought. My main business is growing, and growing fast. We manufacture and sell industrial items for oil and gas and construction equipment for a different industry.
I got head faked by the first two 10% tariffs, not expecting this latest round on China. I have a bunch containers that were on the water before April 2nd, they will clear with 45% tariff. (25% 2018 Trump 301, 20% Fentenol) If I didn't have my head up my rear, I would have doubled my orders. But, you had Chinese New Years in there and it would have limited my production.
I went up on my prices on April 1st to account for the new 20%. My customers expected it, and really haven't complained.
The issue is the huge amount of inventory that I have currently being produced in China. I rented a warehouse there last week and my factories will ship to there to store it, for however long it takes. I have been literally working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week since April 2nd, finding other sources and talking to customers to let them know exactly what we are doing so they don't have to guess.
I have one product I make in Vietnam that I ordered 12 months worth of inventory when he pulled back the tariffs for 90 days. I am thankful that the factory accepted the order and the deadline to get it shipped before the 90 days is up.
Anybody surprised this happened should have listened to the man. He told us what he was going to do. If you are like Brian's company that you run at so low margins that the first tariffs killed the company, well, you should of found other factories in other countries. It's been 7 years. Everybody moved some production out of China.....from Apple on down to me.
I did Mexico during Covid. The reason for buying the Columbia was to fly to Mexico in it rather than my Cherokee. I came out of there with a huge loss of money and confidence in that country to be able to manufacture anything. The big companies make it there because they have huge staff of Americans/Koreans/Germans/Chinese at the factories there daily supervising the production. I don't have such a staff.
Why did so much manufacturing move to China? Because the Chinese know how to say yes. They are also very efficient. We build a lot of aluminum parts that are welded and the quality I get out of there is unsurpassed. I just got a quote today for the same part made here in the USA, told the job shop I would order a years worth today if he could work with me on price and I'd work with him on his schedule. His price (which I expected to be double what I pay in China) was 4X the price and he didn't know if he could hit my quality standards. This is from a fancy shop with a lot of automation and robot welders. My main factory for this part in China is all hand work.
And before you start talking about slave labor and all that. You haven't been to China. The welders and tool and die makers in China are solid middle class. They are recruited heavily by competitors factories, just like the USA, so you either pay them, or lose them. Sure, do they have unskilled labor that makes low wages? Yup, just like any place anywhere in the world. Suprisingly, the unskilled labor is generally old women, needing something to do or a few extra bucks. They work hard in non climate controlled factories, but always have a smile for you, or for me, would bring me gifts when I visit.
I am flying to Turkey next week or the week after, will move some of those aluminum parts from China to Turkey. At a big cost to me because I will not pass that along. I will probably have to live there for a month to train them to make stuff to my caliber. But I can NOT run out of inventory.
Why? Because the market won't allow me to. The price in my industry is set by my competition, who are companies that are 1000x the size of me. I will make it through, because I am a cock roach and a survivor. My business partner and I have been through 4 recessions and one depression in our 40 years. We invest all the profits back into the company and we still watch every dollar spent. Only two ways to make money, one is to raise prices (but I explained I can't), and two is to watch every dollar spent.
We do that in spades.
Now my construction equipment company, it's small and 90% of this equipment worldwide is made in China. I'm waiting on my chinese owned competitors to start raising their prices. We will see what happens, but I have a years worth of inventory.
The other route, I have placed orders for some factory equipment to move some of the easier items in house. Hired a couple of old guys to come out of retirement to set it up. If it doesn't work out, I'll have a fancy CNC laser cutter and cnc press brakes to play with during my retirement. Yeah, that equipment has a 6 month lead time. I have no interest to move all of my production here until all the BS that caused the production to move overseas is fixed. EPA, OSHA, TCEQ all those lettered agencies drove more jobs out of the USA than cheap chinese labor. And it was done on purpose.
I could write a book. But I'll stop. China does have it's bad side. They purposefully flood markets to run other countries out of an industry. They are like locusts. I've seen it in the Solar industry and now in the lithium battery industry. A race to the bottom.,,,,but they only care about dominating a market, not making money this quarter.
So, yes, the tariffs have effected me. But, I knew it was coming, as did the whole world. Don't pretend that he didn't tell us over and over and over. It's just the whole world decided to ignore him. And in some aspect, I am at fault for that as well.
One thing to stock up on.....AC capacitors. Most are made in China, and the summer stock should have been leaving China about right now. Don't wait until August when one burns up and you can't get one. It will be the Toilet Paper of the summer of 2025
I own two companies that manufacture in Asia. Yes, I'm one of those capitalists that offshored production for profit.
How are the tariffs affecting me? Well, after the debate last summer I immediately added warehouse space and spent 100 days in asia bringing in enough inventory to weather the storm....or so I thought. My main business is growing, and growing fast. We manufacture and sell industrial items for oil and gas and construction equipment for a different industry.
I got head faked by the first two 10% tariffs, not expecting this latest round on China. I have a bunch containers that were on the water before April 2nd, they will clear with 45% tariff. (25% 2018 Trump 301, 20% Fentenol) If I didn't have my head up my rear, I would have doubled my orders. But, you had Chinese New Years in there and it would have limited my production.
I went up on my prices on April 1st to account for the new 20%. My customers expected it, and really haven't complained.
The issue is the huge amount of inventory that I have currently being produced in China. I rented a warehouse there last week and my factories will ship to there to store it, for however long it takes. I have been literally working 20 hours a day, 7 days a week since April 2nd, finding other sources and talking to customers to let them know exactly what we are doing so they don't have to guess.
I have one product I make in Vietnam that I ordered 12 months worth of inventory when he pulled back the tariffs for 90 days. I am thankful that the factory accepted the order and the deadline to get it shipped before the 90 days is up.
Anybody surprised this happened should have listened to the man. He told us what he was going to do. If you are like Brian's company that you run at so low margins that the first tariffs killed the company, well, you should of found other factories in other countries. It's been 7 years. Everybody moved some production out of China.....from Apple on down to me.
I did Mexico during Covid. The reason for buying the Columbia was to fly to Mexico in it rather than my Cherokee. I came out of there with a huge loss of money and confidence in that country to be able to manufacture anything. The big companies make it there because they have huge staff of Americans/Koreans/Germans/Chinese at the factories there daily supervising the production. I don't have such a staff.
Why did so much manufacturing move to China? Because the Chinese know how to say yes. They are also very efficient. We build a lot of aluminum parts that are welded and the quality I get out of there is unsurpassed. I just got a quote today for the same part made here in the USA, told the job shop I would order a years worth today if he could work with me on price and I'd work with him on his schedule. His price (which I expected to be double what I pay in China) was 4X the price and he didn't know if he could hit my quality standards. This is from a fancy shop with a lot of automation and robot welders. My main factory for this part in China is all hand work.
And before you start talking about slave labor and all that. You haven't been to China. The welders and tool and die makers in China are solid middle class. They are recruited heavily by competitors factories, just like the USA, so you either pay them, or lose them. Sure, do they have unskilled labor that makes low wages? Yup, just like any place anywhere in the world. Suprisingly, the unskilled labor is generally old women, needing something to do or a few extra bucks. They work hard in non climate controlled factories, but always have a smile for you, or for me, would bring me gifts when I visit.
I am flying to Turkey next week or the week after, will move some of those aluminum parts from China to Turkey. At a big cost to me because I will not pass that along. I will probably have to live there for a month to train them to make stuff to my caliber. But I can NOT run out of inventory.
Why? Because the market won't allow me to. The price in my industry is set by my competition, who are companies that are 1000x the size of me. I will make it through, because I am a cock roach and a survivor. My business partner and I have been through 4 recessions and one depression in our 40 years. We invest all the profits back into the company and we still watch every dollar spent. Only two ways to make money, one is to raise prices (but I explained I can't), and two is to watch every dollar spent.
We do that in spades.
Now my construction equipment company, it's small and 90% of this equipment worldwide is made in China. I'm waiting on my chinese owned competitors to start raising their prices. We will see what happens, but I have a years worth of inventory.
The other route, I have placed orders for some factory equipment to move some of the easier items in house. Hired a couple of old guys to come out of retirement to set it up. If it doesn't work out, I'll have a fancy CNC laser cutter and cnc press brakes to play with during my retirement. Yeah, that equipment has a 6 month lead time. I have no interest to move all of my production here until all the BS that caused the production to move overseas is fixed. EPA, OSHA, TCEQ all those lettered agencies drove more jobs out of the USA than cheap chinese labor. And it was done on purpose.
I could write a book. But I'll stop. China does have it's bad side. They purposefully flood markets to run other countries out of an industry. They are like locusts. I've seen it in the Solar industry and now in the lithium battery industry. A race to the bottom.,,,,but they only care about dominating a market, not making money this quarter.
So, yes, the tariffs have effected me. But, I knew it was coming, as did the whole world. Don't pretend that he didn't tell us over and over and over. It's just the whole world decided to ignore him. And in some aspect, I am at fault for that as well.
One thing to stock up on.....AC capacitors. Most are made in China, and the summer stock should have been leaving China about right now. Don't wait until August when one burns up and you can't get one. It will be the Toilet Paper of the summer of 2025
cowtowner
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You never lived on a farm
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I retired 4 years ago (at 61). I enjoyed my career (most of it) a lot. I don't miss it. I do miss the people and frankly I'm not good at maintaining relationships that don't have built in schedules of some sort. (My problem.) I do wood working projects, music for church, travel and photography. So I keep busy and don't have to keep a schedule most of the time. (oh, yeah, aviation content-I'm getting all the fixed wing ratings other than type ratings.)
When I was contemplating retirement, I talked to number of friends who were either retired or nearing it. Almost all told me some variation of "Don't retire from something. Retire to something." How many people do you know who retired, sat on the couch for a year or two and died? I know less from my generation, but several from my parents generation. My dad was not one of them as he had church activities to keep him going. But he did tell me once that if he hadn't had that, he'd "Work 'til I drop."
Idle time (ala UBI) is great if you have interests and motivation. If not, well, opiates, alcohol, etc will fill the time. And at 18, I'd probably have not had a whole lot of motivation. In fact, getting married at 22 was probably the best thing for my long term sanity (aside from how much my wife of 43 years helps me be sane!) because it motivated me to do something to earn money-which led from electrician's helper (dig ditches, climb in attics, under houses, etc.) to programming to software engineering to CTO.
When I was contemplating retirement, I talked to number of friends who were either retired or nearing it. Almost all told me some variation of "Don't retire from something. Retire to something." How many people do you know who retired, sat on the couch for a year or two and died? I know less from my generation, but several from my parents generation. My dad was not one of them as he had church activities to keep him going. But he did tell me once that if he hadn't had that, he'd "Work 'til I drop."
Idle time (ala UBI) is great if you have interests and motivation. If not, well, opiates, alcohol, etc will fill the time. And at 18, I'd probably have not had a whole lot of motivation. In fact, getting married at 22 was probably the best thing for my long term sanity (aside from how much my wife of 43 years helps me be sane!) because it motivated me to do something to earn money-which led from electrician's helper (dig ditches, climb in attics, under houses, etc.) to programming to software engineering to CTO.
I absolutely did, I grew up on one. I was more thinking of pre-mechanized feudalism type eras but it applies. We were very busy certain times of year for sure and there were lots of days when we had to deal with emergencies that took all day or happened at the most inconvenient possible times under the most unpleasant circumstances. But much of the year we just put out hay for the cattle in the morning and that was it... sometimes when the grass was growing well enough for sufficient grazing not even that. We were always 'on duty' in a sense and going away for any period of time required finding someone to look after the animals but we absolutely had a lot more downtime than a modern day 9-5 office job. It's just that what wasn't downtime was often a lot more intense.
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- Bob Noel
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I guess different farms.
I think my BIL would gaffaw at the notion of more downtime than the 40hr/week worker. No, he wouldn't gaffaw... he'd be rolling on the floor laughing his behind off.
With some farms, there is ALWAYS work to do. Every. Day. of. the. year.
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and what would you spend money on? no one else is working either.
Want to go sking in the winter? who is operating the ski trails, etc?
Want to go flying? how would you get to do that?
perhaps I don't understand your hypothetical proposal.
EdFred
Taxi to Parking
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He's taking the opposite stance. People who have had jobs have a drive to do SOMETHING. People that have never worked, will never have that drive. Why would they? I mean if you want examples, look at the welfare system, and how it is gamed so they don't have to ever do anything except collect a welfare check. 99.9% of people on welfare don't do anything that was mentioned in their utopia.
I’m not at all sure we’re ready for UBI yet, although down the line if automation gets far enough maybe it will need to be a thing. Who knows.
However, I do question why with all the technological progress and increase in productivity we’re not enjoying the fruits of that with more time off.
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Speaking of gaming the system. Today a customer drove his late 90's jeep....with antique plates. Was his daily driver.
A few years ago early in the morning a guy was buying some crappy beer. Only noteworthy because he forgot his EBT card at the convenience store the night before and they knew who it was because of said crappy beer and he was the only one buying it.
And this is why I have a job after leaving full-time as an engineer. I teach computer science at a local university, average age of our students is 27. Many of my students are returning to learn more or changing careers.
Yet I keep getting emails and calls to go back to being an engineer.
My argument was actually the reverse. I think people would, on the whole, be positively miserable if they lived like that.
Not because of the lack of material items available for purchase (in this hypothetical world, robots have taken jobs and still make all "the stuff", so you can still go flying, get AVGAS, go skiing, etc). I think people would be miserable because work actually gives us more than we think.
It's not just about a paycheck -- people like being needed and knowing they can contribute something meaningful. If the message from society becomes: "actually you're not really needed, here's a check" -- I don't think the outcome is some StarTrek-like Utopia where everyone pursues a path of self actualization and perfects their hobbies and lives happily ever after. My hunch is we get much higher incidence of alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicide.
FastEddieB
Touchdown! Greaser!
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Here's a paradox:
I believe the concept of providing every necessity in life without work combined with high rates of social interaction (be it actual physical proximity, or as I hypothesis social media being capable of also triggering the same stimulus response) in mammalian behavior was studied extensively in the 1960’s? It doesn’t work out well, a cursory look into the “mouse utopia experiments” shows the end results.
My boss knows my goal is to work less every year while making more money. My goal is to work myself out of my job through improved efficiency so that when I’m done, my headcount won’t have to be replaced.
To do that I look for efficiencies; how can I standardize, template, and automate repeatable processes to produce a specified product, service, or result.
I’m at the point now where a standard, 40-hour engagement is down to six actual hours of work. That lets me serve more clients. In the white space, I coach the other teams involved in our overall production process on areas they can standardize, template, and automate.
Last year establish our cost baseline at ~$10M. This year we’re on track to actually produce more widgets of the same quality and save about 10% in direct costs.
With the coaching work I’m doing this year, the other teams are finding opportunities to become more efficient which will build on the cost savings next year. Yes, there’s a point of diminishing returns, but a lot of our processes are manual, low hanging fruit. In essence, we’re fat but working out more and starting to eat better.
When we’re down to a healthy size and routine, the company (and our customers) as a whole will be better off.
Ed Haywood
Final Approach
The brain is the best productivity tool.
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I feel this same way. But then if I won the Powerball I'm either buying into an NHL team and/or buying a multiple ranches and going hunting and fishing in perpetuity. Elk season is over. Dammit, now it's bear season. And hey wouldn't you know it, after that its mountain lion season.
Yes the ranch would have its own saloon. And yes you're all invited.
Buying a 195, a Staggerwing, a D18, and something that burns jet A and has a real toilet.