Its a bit different when the wave washes up Trump.

Really has to be some clever agit prop from all the clever libs that work in the creative industries that can put complex messages across simply. Clever in design, and clever in cross platform delivery.

If young metro professionals are all libs, why don't they own, really own, teh interwbes?

One message that I would like to be put across is some nice easy peezy lemon squeezy narrative on why Trump is in fact no ****en way anti establishment.

Talking cross pond here, we have our Trump analogues in UKIP going ham on being anti establishment. The one UKIP MP (defected from Tories) claimed today that UKIP were the modern day Levellers ready to take on the oligarchs.

Someone has to put a stop to this **** now.

The New Yorker: Silicon Valley Has An Empathy Vacuum

It's kind of a mix of one good point and some woe-is-the-working-class Hillbilly Elegy ****.

The good part:

An important point about the future to consider, although lost in this is the mention that only one of the two major parties wants to do anything to help those that will be SOL and left behind by technological innovation like this.

The bad:

To the author's credit, he doesn't necessarily endorse this view as a valid reason to vote for Trump, so he might agree with a lot of us here that Democrats have a messaging issue on this front.

But "the good" mentioned above is definitely worth thinking about. In 15, 20 years long-distance truck driving probably won't be a career. All the people working at Amazon warehouses (who haven't already been replaced by robots) or stocking grocery shelves will have their jobs done by smart machines at a fraction of the cost. Yes, it's extremely disruptive to the millions of people currently doing those jobs, but it's also inescapably inevitable, because capitalism. And I think it's hard to come up with a simple answer to what this means for politics, because if you tell the millions of scrappy Americans in places like Ashtabula OH that everyone else has found a cheaper and more efficient way to build things other than using Ashtabulans' hands, their reaction isn't going to be to accept their new reality and be pragmatic about the best way to move forward, it's going to be to get angry and go to the polls and vote for Trump 3.0 making larger and emptier promises to Make Ashtabula Greater Againer.

So, the author's call for Silicon Valley to "have empathy" is nice and everything, but like, does it actually mean anything concrete whatsoever? Maybe tell us how we start doing that, dude?

I started joking that I must be in a coma ala Philip K Dicks master peice Ubiq, to explain some very anomalous sporting outcomes.

World has just kept getting more twisted and crazy since then.

I got ubiquitous anxiety, **** and fan dialectic will not resolve itself in a higher unity imo.

What do you mean by this? What would that look like?

Yeah no one has any clue what to do about the escalation of automation displacing humans from formerly productive capacities they could earn a living from and it's probably maybe kinda like the subtle but fastest growing political problem of the 21st century, well, aside from the ones we consciously ignore like climate change.

#hottake?

Like the 21st century version of this:



If anything the Trumpians have the initiative in this regard.

Simple messages brilliantly executed then brilliantly placed in eyeballs.

Well, socialists have a clue about what to do. Tax capital and give the money to the newly poor.

Seriously one of the low key unexamined things about the rise of the alt-right/MRA/stuff we have is that we're creating a new subclass of young men who are permanently not marriage material.

Not to sound like Marco Rubio, but it's real tough to settle down and raise a family on $8 or $10 bucks an hour, and from a dating pool scene a bunch of IT guys and doctors and guys with family money are one download of Tinder away. Service sector jobs are unstable by their nature, they don't pay well and there's no incentive for companies to cultivate a culture of long-term employment, it's not like years of experience produce someone meaningfully better at stocking shelves or ringing up purchases.

So these guys are just ****ed. Even the white ones, the American dream of the young family and the picket fence and all that is just never going to happen, so its natural that they cling to Pepe and Milo.

One of the huge but somewhat unspoken justifications New Dealers had for creating the CCC and WPA and other work relief programs was that the Depression created a bunch of newly minted unemployed dudes and the accompanying restive political energies that had the potential to be significantly destabilizing for the social order and might result in reflexive turns to revolutionary or reactionary political movements like they were seeing in Europe. They would quietly acknowledge the programs might not be maximally efficient but keeping America's young men busy, employed, and in units and uniforms and stuff had value.

Its an irony of America, that in the developed world, its one of the places where the American dream is least achievable. Really ****ty mobility.

The GOP is actively working to make it worse, one of the 20th century's drivers of social mobility was the mostly meritocratic civil service. Politics destroying unions and the civil service, while technology destroys manufacturing and truck driving...

What the **** are you supposed to do if you're a 17 year old kid from a working class background? We can't all be Vine stars. Because the media is mostly petty bourgeois coastal types they don't ever really write about this stuff, but we're a couple of generations deep into this now. When your parents both work at Walmart that it's theoretically possible for you to go be a doctor or lawyer(with $200k of student loans) if you're smart enough is a cold comfort for people who are in the 70th percentile on the SAT.

This might sound familiar to contemporary criticisms of civil service and public unions but the 1930s/early 40s GOP vilified the WPA and accused Roosevelt of creating a class of laborers beholden to him, functionally on the government dole.

The arguments never change.

CCC was organized like the military. People were put in corps and camps with Army barracks were set up and commanders were reserve Army officers. Such socialist programs were supported by influential thinkers like:

Guys, unemployment is under 5%. Ain't no one going to sign up to live in a quasimilitary encampment and dig holes in the woods for room, board, and $500 a month.

To be clear I wasn't explicitly endorsing reinstituting the CCC or WPA specifically as constituted in the 1930s but just noting that Fly's point about a significant amount of unemployed young, fractious men has long been considered to be a serious problem in almost any society that has experienced the condition.

But the design behind the program was yeah, sure, make-work to give unmarried unemployed dudes living expenses and a roof over their heads, but just as important was getting young guys off of the streets, away from radical pamphleteers on the corner, give the long-term unemployed something vaguely productive to do so they might be able to transition to more employable state, and to give young guys a sense of civic and nationalist pride and improve community morale.

I'm not suggesting it's an ideal and again, I'll reiterate "literally rebuild the CCC" is not precisely what I'm advocating for but I think it's important to recognize Fly's commentary there (scores of young, unmarried guys without families and not much to do generally produce some surprisingly large amount of social ills) and that again, opaquely, civic service is a historic solution to that problem with some measure of success.

Is it drastically different from the more amenable solutions to the neoliberal style, e.g., technocratic solutions like guaranteed minimum incomes and more robust welfare state handouts? It's just trying to triangulate the idea that a handout is just a giant indignity to the receiver which I dunno, seems like this durable thing that is hard to beat back. So hand out money but put the guy getting a handout into some sort of civic service position they can be proud of and isn't labeled a handout. We can dispense of the 1930s theatrics like the uniforms and making them march in the town Memorial Day parade or whatever, I agree maybe the average 2016 young dude is too cynical for that.

Not $500 a month and yeah unemployment is low so it's not a big deal now, but lots of people who join the military do it because it's a job with some training and benefits.

I posted about it mostly because I'm reading The Road to Serfdom and it reminded me of that and how one of the big inspirations for the modern libertarians was cool with big government employment projects.

Comparisons to the WPA/CCC might be misleading. With a universal minimum income we're not talking about a temporary stimulus measure but more of a permanent arrangement. Even a hardcore Keynesian would probably tell you that right now a WPA-style stimulus might be counterproductive since the economy is humming along mostly normally and not in a recession.

Not sure why you guys are freaking out (or looking forward to new stone stadiums like I am) about some work program when Dvalt1 is only talking about how while economically it makes sense to just give people money; money is liquid and people can spend it how they want, politically people wants jobs as their source of income and look down on cash hand outs as incentivizing indolence. If that's the case, then in the future when larger portions of income go to a smaller portion of the population and we need to redistribute more to more of the population, is it better to invent high paying 'make work' jobs so people feel a sense of self worth to mask the handout or should we straight up give them money and let the stigma of welfare handouts fade?

Here is another video I liked. There is a lot of this stuff on Youtube to peruse.

Robots took mah job!

That's kinda what I'm talking about with Ashtabula 2036 - not just "what do we do for these people", but also "how do we get them to accept it"?

A little stimulus, a little more free education, a little negative income tax, overtime after 30 hours a week, then 20, a little longer retirement...

We'll become the people on the space cruise ship on Wall-E so gradually we won't notice enough to feel like it's a handout.

Overall unemployment is under 5 percent. Many communities are way above that. One way to reach out to the working class america is not to rub their nose in it, or say that no one would choose steady employment, room and board, probably good health insurance, and some constructive preparation for the rest of their life.

The forest fire fighting jobs are a bit like military jobs only I think the pay is horrible, it's incredibly hard and fairly dangerous, it's not steady and there are no benefits. And I think people still line up to do it in hopes of it leading to a solid middle class job with benefits as a city firefighter.

I trust that you are being facetious, but the Maslow hierarchy tells us that when you solve people's basic needs, they strive for more, not less.