Alberta Politics Thread

[Kjesse]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

With less and less people being employed, the employers will be required to pay for more and more people to not be employed by them.

I've tried hard to stay away from this guy's posts, and many reponses are saying things close to what I'd like to also say, but this is so fundamentally ridiculous I just have to chime in.

This is putting the burden on enterprises to hire people to work or pay them to not to. This is not even communism level of stupidity, its stupidity. You can start a business and hire someone but if you let them go because you have a machine that can do the job, you still have to pay them?

You should get off the internet and start communicating via carrier pigeon, though even that might be too much technology for you, as that puts some guy sending smoke signals out of work, not to mention those tending the fire and curing the hide.

[Tron_fdc]

Originally Posted by Locke

This is what I keep saying, but they keep hiring Government workers.

I'm fairly certain that's their idea of "infrastructure" spending.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Delgar

I've tried hard to stay away from this guy's posts, and many reponses are saying things close to what I'd like to also say, but this is so fundamentally ridiculous I just have to chime in.

This is putting the burden on enterprises to hire people to work or pay them to not to. This is not even communism level of stupidity, its stupidity. You can start a business and hire someone but if you let them go because you have a machine that can do the job, you still have to pay them?

You should get off the internet and start communicating via carrier pigeon, though even that might be too much technology for you, as that puts some guy sending smoke signals out of work, not to mention those tending the fire and curing the hide.

If you took the time to read the post I was responding to instead of just looking for a line from my post to take out of context and then attack a point I was not trying to make, you may have noticed that the point I was responding to was the argument for consumption taxes as a means to fund income equalization would be a burden put more and more on employers if more and more people lose their jobs. Do the math, less consumers=less consumption, meaning less revenue generated by a consumption tax. With less consumers able to be taxed and an increase in the revenue needed to fund equalization, where would we make up the shortfall? Who would have money left?

If you are having difficulty staying away from my posts, maybe try the ignore button? You seem to be getting worked up over your own misunderstanding, not sure what my posts have to do with it. Many of the posters in here may not agree with what I'm saying and vice versa, but I will say that I still take the time to consider what they are saying and given some PMs I've received from posters in threads like this as well as the response posts that are at the very least respectful and well thought out, I'd say most people here are at least take the time to consider and think about what I have to say. If we were all hiding in the dark waiting for an opportunity to attack and insult a specific poster simply because we don't agree with them, as you appear to be doing, it'd be a pretty lousy thread now wouldn't it? By all means continue doing so if you so choose, but attacking my views with childish insults really isn't going to dissuade me from posting them, nor will they bring any legitimacy to your argument. Just seems like a lot of headache for you to go through with no real gain. Not sure if it's a communism level of headache but a headache none the less.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

I can appreciate where you are coming from, but the fact is when people lose their jobs they can't exactly be counted on to cover equalization. With less and less people being employed, the employers will be required to pay for more and more people to not be employed by them. When you have real people working for you and you expand you are reinvesting into the economy. When you eliminate jobs but are still expanding you are investing solely in yourself, if you need to pay more for equalization so that you are able to maintain customers/revenue it seems to me like eventually you will be losing on that if more and more people are out of work.

I can see your point of paying someone to do nothing instead of using a machine, but if you choose to pay for that machine instead, under your suggestion you will still be paying people to do nothing.

I can understand everyone's concern with businesses choosing then to instead invest into foreign markets, but I really believe that this will eventually become a global issue and if we don't address the issue sooner rather than later, we could eventually find ourselves in a situation we can't get ourselves out of. If we get to a point where employers have the ability to dictate our quality of life or how much they need to give up to do so because we've lost all leverage due to the fact that they can operate without workers what will equalization really look like?

I don't think anyone disagrees that humans being replaced by machines is an issue that will need addressing. The answer has never been nor ever will be make automation more expensive.

If a person is doing a task that a machine can do cheaper they aren't doing work. let me ask you this: Why does an economy grow?

[puckedoff]

Originally Posted by GGG

Why does an economy grow?

Why does an economy feel?

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by GGG

I don't think anyone disagrees that humans being replaced by machines is an issue that will need addressing. The answer has never been nor ever will be make automation more expensive.

If a person is doing a task that a machine can do cheaper they aren't doing work. let me ask you this: Why does an economy grow?

Why does any economy grow? Because the conditions exist for growth. How does our economy grow? Currently it's by increased consumer spending which provides greater revenue for businesses, which can create an opportunity for expansion.

How does an economy grow by having less employed people contributing through consumerism and more unemployed people needing subsidy without any other influx to boost consumerism?

This idea of a consumption tax to pay for maintaining minimum living standards for those now unemployed does not promote growth, it would temporarily slow the bleeding at best. The folks being subsidized would have nothing to contribute to the economy, all the while people and employers paying to subsidize them would have less to contribute to economic growth as well.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

Why does any economy grow? Because the conditions exist for growth. How does our economy grow? Currently it's by increased consumer spending

Wrong already.

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Handsome B. Wonderful

Wrong already.

I'm impressed with the amount of thought that you managed to put into that response

Didn't think you had it in you

[Dion]

Originally Posted by Handsome B. Wonderful

Wrong already.

Are you trying to be a condesending prick?

I get that you don't like the responses of iggy oi but the insults are uncalled for and unecessary.

[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

To prevent the system from collapsing altogether. Look at the desperate measures already being taken to try to encourage spending:

1) Historically low interest rates.
2) Historically high household debt.
3) Historically high government debt.

All the levers to increase spending and revive the economy are already maxed out. And most of the world still hasn't recovered from 2008 (a point that Albertans tend to be unaware of because the oil boom continued for six years after that).

We're seeing two historical forces that together are leading us into uncharted territory.

After the gains made by labour in the 20th century (mostly owing to the loss of capital suffered in the two Great Wars), we're seeing capital regain its supremacy. Expect to see concentrations of wealth the likes of which we haven't seen in over a century.

The process of automation that is just picking up steam is different from other eras of technological change because we're destroying jobs far faster than we're creating new ones. The new industries and companies only employ a fraction of people as the companies they're replacing did. Kodak once employed 145,000 people. The company leading the 'disruption' when Kodak went bankrupt was Instagram. It employed 13 people.





Automated cars will put half a million Canadians out of work. How many software developers and other new jobs will be needed to replace them? 1,000? If that? 42 per cent of Canadians jobs are at high risk of automation.

Here's a sobering number: 0.5 per cent of Americans are employed in industries that have emerged since 2000. http://www.economist.com/news/specia...on-and-anxiety

I'm not against progress. But we need to prepare for a labour market - and a society - where half the workforce will be deemed unnecessary. You can't train everyone to be software developers. And in fact, software development itself is becoming less and less labour intensive. Some people simply don't have the intelligence or flexibility to thrive in a high tech economy. And we only need so many waiters and bartenders - especially in a society where wealth will be so concentrated that most people won't be able to eat out regularly.

In an economy built on mass consumption and mass spending, it will be in the interests of not only government, but banks and corporations themselves to find some way to get all that money that will be concentrated in very few hands into the hands of hundreds of millions of unemployed or underemployed so it can circulate in the economy. The market isn't going to do it naturally. It will require intervention on a scale we've never seen.

Just today I read analysis about Albertas future and how we will have a widening gap between the jobs required in oil and gas and the workers to fill it out to 2035.

Regardless your posts are always very interesting.

If your scenario is true one has to think it breeds the conditions for major conflicts and war. I think human nature lends itself to correction when the masses and middle class are squeezed beyond a reasonable ability for upward class mobility. If the elite is a consolidating group and wealth continues to concentrate, would there not be a visceral and violent reaction to adjust the system? We have seen that repeatedly throughout history.

[jammies]

Iggy_oi, you are proposing industrial solutions to post-industrial problems. This isn't the 1930s.

Economic growth is based on technology now, as even resource extraction, which you'd expect to be a throwback to simpler times, is mostly made profitable (and sometimes only possible) by high-tech machinery, automation, and computing. There will always be jobs for technicians, bureaucrats, and entertainers, but outside of those, it's going to get much worse.

If we're very lucky, we'll end up with a post-scarcity society once technology advances sufficiently and elites are made irrelevant. If we're unlucky, the underclass will decide they can't wait that long, and there will be upheaval and revolutions that will make the socialist revolutions of the 1848 to 1949 era seem like rehearsals before the main show.

Successful government that will enable the better and much less likely future will be based on what might cynically be called appeasement, and kindly called empowerment. As long as enough people benefit, or think they benefit, from a society, it will endure. However, if enough idiots cry "Don't tax *my* money!" or "Let's build walls around our communities!" or "Smash the machines that take our jobs!" or "The rich are what's wrong with society!", then it will all fall apart, and quickly.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by jammies

Iggy_oi, you are proposing industrial solutions to post-industrial problems. This isn't the 1930s.

Economic growth is based on technology now, as even resource extraction, which you'd expect to be a throwback to simpler times, is mostly made profitable (and sometimes only possible) by high-tech machinery, automation, and computing. There will always be jobs for technicians, bureaucrats, and entertainers, but outside of those, it's going to get much worse.

If we're very lucky, we'll end up with a post-scarcity society once technology advances sufficiently and elites are made irrelevant. If we're unlucky, the underclass will decide they can't wait that long, and there will be upheaval and revolutions that will make the socialist revolutions of the 1848 to 1949 era seem like rehearsals before the main show.

Successful government that will enable the better and much less likely future will be based on what might cynically be called appeasement, and kindly called empowerment. As long as enough people benefit, or think they benefit, from a society, it will endure. However, if enough idiots cry "Don't tax *my* money!" or "Let's build walls around our communities!" or "Smash the machines that take our jobs!" or "The rich are what's wrong with society!", then it will all fall apart, and quickly.

"Yes....I'd like a combo #3."

[Dion]

One Alberta, two realities on jobless front

First the fantasy of the NDP:

In one reality, jobs are being created, the unemployment rate is falling in cities like Edmonton and the economy is slowly getting better — or has stopped getting worse.

That was the picture painted by Economic Development Minister Deron Bilous on Monday when he updated the provincial government’s job creation efforts.

“Our plan is creating jobs and we are getting back on our feet,” he declared while in Calgary at an office hub for technology and other startup firms.

“If you look at numbers in the past three months … we are starting to turn a corner and trending in a positive direction.”

The government is taking action, he insists.

The provincial jobs plan catalogues a number of steps taken in the past year, including the NDP’s effort to ramp up capital spending to $34.8 billion over five years on projects such as hospitals and roads.

The government estimates this will sustain an average of 10,000 jobs annually for three years.

This summer, the province restarted a student job program that created an estimated 2,700 positions. Other initiatives are designed to stimulate new work in the future.

The province’s initiative to provide $500 million in royalty credits to incentivize new petrochemical facilities are supposed to add 3,000 new construction positions and more than 1,000 permanent jobs.

Two announced tax credits for investor and companies are also expected to add about 4,500 new jobs each, once they come into effect.

Bilous is confident these initiatives are gaining momentum, but acknowledges it’s been a challenging couple of years with the oil and gas sector hit by low commodity prices.

“Believe me I recognize that for those Albertans that are out of work or who have lost their job in the past year and a half, they are struggling,” said the Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview MLA.

“There is hope and we are turning a corner as far as numbers go.”

The reality:

Recent payroll data indicate 35,000 Albertans like Howard have been unemployed for more than a year. About 60,000 people — roughly the population of Airdrie — have been without work for six months or more.

In the past year, 47,000 full-time jobs in Alberta have vanished.

The 47-year-old father of two daughters has been out of work for a year from his job as a mechanical piping designer working on oil and gas facilities.

His employment insurance recently ran out. His bills are mounting — as is his frustration.

“Rent is coming at the end of November, and I don’t know what we’re going to do,” he said.

“My daughter, believe it or not, is helping us out (financially) and she works at Dairy Queen, but I can’t even get a job at Dairy Queen.”

Howard spoke to Postmedia after federal statistics released Friday showed the unemployment rate in the province stayed flat at 8.5 per cent in October, but jumped to 10.2 per cent in Calgary.

That’s up from 6.7 per cent a year earlier.

It’s all well and good to talk about hope when it comes to the job situation improving in the province.

However, for too many Albertans, that’s not what they’re seeing on the ground.

For people like Howard and thousands of others searching for work, it’s simply too early to say we’ve turned the corner — at least not in this corner of Alberta.

“It doesn’t feel like it’s turning around,” Howard said Monday evening after hearing the minister’s remarks.

“I feel like there’s no hope.”

http://calgaryherald.com/business/en...-jobless-front

[Cube Inmate]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

Why does any economy grow? Because the conditions exist for growth. How does our economy grow? Currently it's by increased consumer spending which provides greater revenue for businesses, which can create an opportunity for expansion.

Increasing profit yields expansion. Increasing revenues are meaningless if you insist that costs increase apace.

[AltaGuy]

Originally Posted by jammies

If we're very lucky, we'll end up with a post-scarcity society once technology advances sufficiently and elites are made irrelevant. If we're unlucky, the underclass will decide they can't wait that long, and there will be upheaval and revolutions that will make the socialist revolutions of the 1848 to 1949 era seem like rehearsals before the main show.

It's a rosy picture. I agree with it though. Inequality is so structural, always has been. The effect of automation on living standards is the real question.

Thomas Piketty really nailed it. Cliff's great post above sounded just like him.

[OMG!WTF!]

Kodak once employed 145,000 people. The company leading the 'disruption' when Kodak went bankrupt was Instagram. It employed 13 people.

The article this factoid comes from goes on to suggest it was the iPhone that actually replaced Kodak and Apple employs just over a gazillion people who collectively make more money that Kodak could ever imagine. The same Economist article gives two sides of the story and suggests the truth is in the middle...namely we likely will net more job opportunities via automation but will be required to adapt to them quicker. I think that's kind of the main point. If you want to think automation is going to snatch your baby up you can. But historically that's not what happened and currently that's not what some people think will happen. Also we used to wonder how we were going to replace baby boomers in the work force. Is that no longer a concern?

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

Why can't we try to find ways to give companies incentives to train their current staff into new roles before their jobs are eliminated by automation? Will that really decimate the industries?

I should have realized I would have to hand-hold you through the hows and whys of your ideas being disastrous.

For the sake of simplicity, lets focus on the manufacturing sector:

Let us assume a factory employs 100 people to make its widgets. It already has enough HR, finance, IT people to run the business. The next innovation comes along that would allow this factory to achieve the same output with 80 workers.

In this scenario, your arguments offer two major proposals on how to move forward.

1.: The company cannot adopt this innovation because you have passed a law banning innovation. Your prices necessarily remain the same while your competitors, operating in other jurisdictions, adopt the technology and begin to significantly undercut your prices. You lose orders. You go out of business. 100 people unemployed. What do you do now?

2: The company can adopt this innovation, but must re-train the 20 surplus employees. You need only a couple to support and maintain the new equipment, but still have 16-18 employees left over and no openings. What do you retrain them to do such that they add value to the company? And keep in mind, Iggy, that if you expect them to just do make-work projects, you are burdening the company with excessive cost that undermines the value of the new innovation. End result: you fail to remain competitive with other factories in your industry. And that, much like scenario 1, ultimately results in the closure of the factory.

[Resolute 14]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

The article this factoid comes from goes on to suggest it was the iPhone that actually replaced Kodak and Apple employs just over a gazillion people who collectively make more money that Kodak could ever imagine. The same Economist article gives two sides of the story and suggests the truth is in the middle...namely we likely will net more job opportunities via automation but will be required to adapt to them quicker. I think that's kind of the main point. If you want to think automation is going to snatch your baby up you can. But historically that's not what happened and currently that's not what some people think will happen. Also we used to wonder how we were going to replace baby boomers in the work force. Is that no longer a concern?

I am more amused that someone out there actually thinks Instagram led the charge to 'disrupt' Kodak. Instagram did nothing of the sort. What disrupted Kodak was the digital camera, which Instagram does not manufacture, and specifically: digital storage, which Instagram does not manufacture.

Instagram is not a disruptor, but part of a new subset of the photography industry created by the companies that did disrupt traditional film cameras. What Instragram disrupted was the photo album industry.

As noted, the smart phone has done more to damage the traditional camera industry. And the smart phone industry is now huge.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

Why does any economy grow? Because the conditions exist for growth. How does our economy grow? Currently it's by increased consumer spending which provides greater revenue for businesses, which can create an opportunity for expansion.

How does an economy grow by having less employed people contributing through consumerism and more unemployed people needing subsidy without any other influx to boost consumerism?

This idea of a consumption tax to pay for maintaining minimum living standards for those now unemployed does not promote growth, it would temporarily slow the bleeding at best. The folks being subsidized would have nothing to contribute to the economy, all the while people and employers paying to subsidize them would have less to contribute to economic growth as well.

I mean on a much more macro level. The economy does not grow because people spend more. In a vacuum all that does is cause inflation because the amount of stuff remains finite.

At a macro level an economy grows through the creation of surplus. So we put in a bunch of work(human and mechanical) and the value of that work is greater than the amount of work put into it.

Think about that for a while and you will see why automation drives growth.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

It's a rosy picture. I agree with it though. Inequality is so structural, always has been. The effect of automation on living standards is the real question.

Thomas Piketty really nailed it. Cliff's great post above sounded just like him.

Yeah, my concern is that the concentration of capital Piketty has analyzed + the acceleration of automation = an era of disparity and mass insecurity that we haven't seen in over a century.

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

The article this factoid comes from goes on to suggest it was the iPhone that actually replaced Kodak and Apple employs just over a gazillion people who collectively make more money that Kodak could ever imagine. The same Economist article gives two sides of the story and suggests the truth is in the middle...namely we likely will net more job opportunities via automation but will be required to adapt to them quicker. I think that's kind of the main point. If you want to think automation is going to snatch your baby up you can. But historically that's not what happened and currently that's not what some people think will happen. Also we used to wonder how we were going to replace baby boomers in the work force. Is that no longer a concern?

The article also points out that the people who are most concerned about automation are people who actually work in tech (and realize how few jobs it represents), and the people who are more optimistic about the future are historians, who figure that because new technologies have always created lots and lots of new jobs in the past they will continue to do so in the future.

Reasonable people can disagree on which outlook they find more persuasive.