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If automation is cheaper, things should be automated. It's not, though.


I agree, they should.

Labor market shortages due to short term government incentives are going to lead to long term capital investments that automate manufacturing and service work happening sooner rather than later.

That was going to happen in a decade or two regardless. But if there's been one common thread in the insane policies of the last year, it's accelerationism. People will be caught in between without the skills to navigate it.


Then government should protect them, instead of preserving jobs that left them working nearly full-time and receiving transfer payments. Transfer payments going to full-time workers are simply subsidies to their employers.


For how long? I'm talking about people in their 30's who don't realize that there is never going to be a job for them again in the industry they were working in back in February 2020.

Mass UBI is not going to be the utopia people imagine it to be.


If we don't need their work because productivity is so high, then forever. If we do need their work, we should funnel them into the training they need to do it.


What right do they have to the sweat of my brow?

What's in it for me to sustain those who provide nothing of use?


"Let the chips fall where they may" is exactly how we got here. You can't just "retrain" millions of people to be software engineers.

Again with the utopianism.


Capital doesn’t substitute for labor in an entire industry. (The reason it appears to is publication bias in economics papers.)

For instance, Australia has plenty of restaurant and fast food workers but has automated McDs ordering and a 20USD minimum wage.




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