I’ve copied this (see below), verbatim, because it points out a process, which was foreseen back in the 1980’s, and which has yet to be properly addressed by our politicians; or by Political and Economic Theorists.
It is something which the 99% needs to force Politicians etc. to act on, or else the 1% will foolishly try to claim all the benefits of I.T. to prosper themselves, alone.
I say foolishly because the Capitalist Utopia consists of the 99%, having just sufficient income to survive upon, yet still consuming (and therefore paying for) the products produced by the robot factories, owned solely by the 1%.
Explaining the paradox to such people won’t help, because these people are wealth addicts, who can’t see that when there is only one of them left and he/she has all the money, the game (as in Monopoly) is over.
If the game is to continue, there needs to be a continual flow of cash back to the other players and a periodic redistribution of monopoly rights.
As in the parable of the ten talents, we could do with something along the lines of each person, entering Society, being apportioned a share of its wealth.
Then, at their departure, they return what they have left.
Some will have used their talents to improve the Commonwealth and be praised.
Some will have simply squandered them and be despised.
Other’s will have hidden their talents under a bush and be pitied.
I’m not an Economist, or Political Theorist and would have no idea on how to turn this, or any variation, into a coherent system but someone needs to.
Marxist and Keynsian Economics no longer have any support and I suspect that Milton Friedman’s theories won’t survive the next decade (for the reasons outlined above).
A new premise needs to be worked out soon, to soften the impact of political implosion, when Government has privatised itself out of business.
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Skilled Work, Without the Worker – This is an interesting article on robotics for manufacturing, and ultimately, much more. Written by John Markoff for the NYT & IHT,
DRACHTEN, the Netherlands – At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break – three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.
Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones,
it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
And from the conclusion:
Inside a spartan garage in an industrial neighborhood in Palo Alto, Calif., a robot armed with electronic “eyes” and a small scoop and suction cups repeatedly picks up boxes and drops them onto a conveyor belt.
It is doing what low-wage workers do every day around the world.
Older robots cannot do such work because computer vision systems were costly and limited to carefully controlled environments where the lighting was just right. But thanks to an inexpensive stereo camera and software that lets the system see shapes with the same ease as humans, this robot can quickly discern the irregular dimensions of randomly placed objects.
The robot uses a technology pioneered in Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensing system for its Xbox video game system.
Such robots will put automation within range of companies like Federal Express and United Parcel Service that now employ tens of thousands of workers doing such tasks.
The start-up behind the robot, Industrial Perception Inc., is the first spinoff of Willow Garage, an ambitious robotics research firm based in Menlo Park, Calif. The first customer is likely to be a company that now employs thousands of workers to load and unload its trucks. The workers can move one box every six seconds on average. But each box can weigh more than 130 pounds, so the workers tire easily and sometimes hurt their backs.
Industrial Perception will win its contract if its machine can reliably move one box every four seconds. The engineers are confident that the robot will soon do much better than that, picking up and setting down one box per second.
“We’re on the cusp of completely changing manufacturing and distribution,” said Gary Bradski, a machine-vision scientist who is a founder of Industrial Perception. “I think it’s not as singular an event, but it will ultimately have as big an impact as the Internet.”
My view – Robotic assembly has been with us for several decades, slowly improving year after year. Now the process is accelerating, thanks to super-fast processors and increasingly sophisticated software. I think the rate of development in robotics is now on the cusp of exponential growth, just as we have seen with computers and communications devices.
This is genuine manufacturing progress of unprecedented speed and proportion. It will increase quality and greatly reduce costs, improving profits for successful enterprises. It will considerably nullify the low wage advantage of developing countries, although they too can benefit from robotics. Yes, robotics is playing its part in levelling the playing field in terms of costs, bringing more manufacturing back to developed countries in the process.
As the cost of manufacturing becomes less of a factor from country to country, companies will be able to produce goods in closer proximity to their component suppliers and especially their customers. Also, competitive rates of taxation will remain a crucial factor in attracting manufacturing sites. Successful Autonomies will thrive more than ever in this environment.
The social problems of permanently high unemployment are daunting and no more likely to be resolved by Luddite policies in the era of robotics than at any other time in human history. Far greater vision will be required to deal with this problem than we have seen to date. If we think about it, there is very little in the way of human endeavour that future generations of robots will not be able to do more successfully than people, aside from recreational pursuits. We will always enjoy social sciences, the arts in their various forms and sport.
reproduced from Fullermoney: a suggestion that Germany should leave the Euro.
May 17, 2013I still think the simplest solution is to get out of the EU. This novel version seems to suggest that all would be well if Germany pulled out of the Euro. It’s just papering over the cracks, I reckon.
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Bloomberg Part 1 – Save Europe: Split the Euro – Here is the opening for the first of two interesting articles from Bloomberg on why the euro should be split:
On the eve of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln famously said that “a house divided cannot stand.” Today, the European Union — committed for decades to the quest for “ever closer union” — must confront an agonizing truth. Lincoln’s maxim must be inverted. For the EU to survive, the euro must divide. Between the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and the Single European Act in 1986, Europe’s governments brought about the one great peaceful revolution the continent has seen in its long and troubled history. The creation of a single European currency would build on this remarkable success. It was the next vital step to greater unity and prosperity. The economic crisis in southern Europe shows that the euro system, at least in its current form, has instead become a mortal threat to both. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Cyprus are trapped in a recession and cannot restore their competitiveness by devaluing their currencies. The euro area’s northern economies have had to join in repeated bailouts and put aside their notions of prudent finance. A vicious circle of resentment and populism in the south and strengthening nationalism in the north is tearing the union apart. And the crisis isn’t yet abating. France, Europe’s second-largest economy, is now sinking into a grave economic slump. Like the southern countries, it must restore its competitiveness; like them, as part of the euro system, it lacks the means. Because of its size and because of the guiding role it has played in the EU’s development, France, we’ll argue in Part 2 of this article, will be crucial in breaking the vicious circle. Bloomberg Part 2 – France Must Lead Breakup of Euro – Here is a middle section from Part 2: For France and for the euro system as a whole, the best strategy is to dismantle the monetary union from the top — via the exit of Germany and the other most competitive countries. Appreciation of the new German currency would improve the deficit countries’ trade balances.
In some cases, debt write-offs would still be necessary, but the scale of reduction and the cost to creditors would be smaller because the monetary dismantling would boost the deficit countries’ growth. The surplus countries would have to recapitalize their banks after losses due to any debt reduction, so exiting the system doesn’t mean abandoning the crisis countries. The difference is that, after the exits, their assistance would help put the deficit countries on a recovery path, whereas the current bailouts lead only to a dead end. The European Central Bank would have to strive to maintain credibility and trust during any controlled dismantling of the euro system. The ECB could be preserved, at least for some time, as the central bank responsible for monetary policy in all 17 member countries, even after some had replaced the euro with new currencies. This would facilitate strong policy coordination among the former members and demonstrate that the segmentation was an orderly transformation carried out under the control of the most respected and credible European institution. Many observers concede that the euro was a mistake but think there’s no going back. They reckon that dissolving the monetary union would lead to economic chaos, first in Europe, and then around the world. European leaders are afraid that backtracking on the euro project would also be a lethal blow to the larger cause of European integration and could be the beginning of the end of the EU and the single market. These fears give rise to what we regard as the disastrous strategy of defending the euro at all costs. Although a controlled segmentation of the euro system through the exit of the most competitive countries would actually be the most effective way to help the deficit countries, it could still be seen as a decision by the strong to abandon the weak. Europe’s history makes it difficult for Germany’s leaders to initiate such a move. My view – Veteran subscribers may recall that I favoured retention of the European Free Trade Association, to preserve peace and promote economic growth within Europe, long before the single currency was launched. Currency unions, formed by aligned countries which wish to remain independent, have had a difficult history.
Predictably, the euro has not avoided similar problems. It was the triumph of ego and naivety, rather than common sense. It has also compromised democracy within modern Europe. Worse still, it has revived historic enmities among ancient civilisations.
Nevertheless, I have also maintained that the euro would survive, if that is what most Europeans actually want. Today, European governments still proclaim their commitment to the euro, publicly, but this has an increasingly hollow ring. Few European politicians would test this resolve with a ‘yes or no’ referendum on whether or not their citizens favour remaining within the single currency.
Obviously, the single currency would be less contentious if Europe’s economic performance improved. It could, and should, as Europe has moved somewhat closer to fiscal union. Mario Draghi’s ECB has been very effective in lowering interest rates among Europe’s countries with deficit problems. This has bought time but the ECB does not have the mandate to institute pro-growth policies.
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