very good read on why trump won. not liberal not conservative

[IronWing]

As for all the rural jobs going away, not likely. So long as people want to live in rural communities, there will be rural jobs. Do you think guiding services will be automated? Forest management? Farming? Ranching? By the time these jobs are all automated, I'd say all the urban jobs will be automated as well.

Ranching is already converted over to factory farming (intense grazing of irrigated pasture => feed lot => slaughter house) for the most part. It takes fewer people and bigger operators. Only endless public subsidies keeps traditional western public lands ranching propped up. Field crop automation was mostly completed in the early 20th century with tractor, planters, combines, and the rest. The newer thing is farm consolidation with fewer farm owners and more low wage farm laborers working for somebody else.

The buncher-feller drastically reduces the number of lumberjacks needed to harvest trees. The move to off-shore lumber mills allows lumber companies to avoid labor and anti-pollution laws is further gutting the domestic labor needs of the industry. These jobs aren't going to come back.

The mining industry is going to automation as fast as the technology can be deployed. Fully automated haul trucks, trains, drill rigs, and shovels are already in use. Drones are being developed for underground mapping and real time ore body evaluation at the mine face. Mining has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past few decades and none of those jobs are coming back even as production increases.

For rural communities to recover they have to develop jobs that generate sufficient revenue to cover the costs of living in rural areas and it isn't that cheap. Land is cheaper but almost everything else costs more.

 

[Udgnim]

I'm one of those country people. From what I've seen is that we are sick of the lack of morality as much as anything. I won't get into it as it's not politically correct anymore to live your life with any morals. And yeah watching jobs being shipped out to China doesn't help either. I keep hearing well robots. Sorry to inform but I go to factories around the Dallas Fort Worth area on a regular basis as I'm a truck driver. I've yet to see this fully automated factory full of cheap robot labor.

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/201..._term=related_resources&utm_campaign=fredblog

2016 manufacturing is flat relative to the peak around 2008

manufacturing employment has been decreasing since around 2002

the big decreases in manufacturing employment coincided with recessions in the US

manufacturing output eventually recovered but manufacturing employment did not see a similar recovery. increasing use of automation in manufacturing is the reason why.

 

[JSt0rm]

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/201..._term=related_resources&utm_campaign=fredblog

2016 manufacturing is flat relative to the peak around 2008

manufacturing employment has been decreasing since around 2002

the big decreases in manufacturing employment coincided with recessions in the US

manufacturing output eventually recovered but manufacturing employment did not see a similar recovery. increasing use of automation in manufacturing is the reason why.

trump will ban automation

 

[mect]

Ranching is already converted over to factory farming (intense grazing of irrigated pasture => feed lot => slaughter house) for the most part. It takes fewer people and bigger operators. Only endless public subsidies keeps traditional western public lands ranching propped up. Field crop automation was mostly completed in the early 20th century with tractor, planters, combines, and the rest. The newer thing is farm consolidation with fewer farm owners and more low wage farm laborers working for somebody else.

The buncher-feller drastically reduces the number of lumberjacks needed to harvest trees. The move to off-shore lumber mills allows lumber companies to avoid labor and anti-pollution laws is further gutting the domestic labor needs of the industry. These jobs aren't going to come back.

The mining industry is going to automation as fast as the technology can be deployed. Fully automated haul trucks, trains, drill rigs, and shovels are already in use. Drones are being developed for underground mapping and real time ore body evaluation at the mine face. Mining has shed hundreds of thousands of jobs over the past few decades and none of those jobs are coming back even as production increases.

For rural communities to recover they have to develop jobs that generate sufficient revenue to cover the costs of living in rural areas and it isn't that cheap. Land is cheaper but almost everything else costs more.

All of these things still require a labor force. The easily automated jobs are already gone. Appropriate environmental regulations would bring back some of those, but I agree, these jobs in general aren't coming back. However, you are incorrect to state that almost everything besides land costs more. Housing is cheaper, labor is cheaper, energy is cheaper. You can live comfortably in most rural areas for $50k a year in a nice home. In conversations I've had with people from the tech industry, the reason they have trouble expanding into rural areas isn't because of cost. They all agree they could greatly reduce costs. The reason is they can't get a high enough density of qualified workers in these communities. The rural communities that are able to meet these needs are doing really well. A neighboring rural county has recently had server farms from both amazon and facebook go in. That area is doing extremely well because they have embraced allowing high tech jobs in their rural community. Even my county has benefited significantly recently from wind farm installations. The problem is a lot of the rural communities are only content with lumber jobs, mining jobs, and ranching jobs. It isn't that rural communities have to disappear, but they will have to adapt.

 

[rudder]

The map was very telling and sad at the same time. The reality is 62% of Americans live in cities and it's growing but huge swaths of land are essentially the wild west out there. A big city like Boston or Chicago is as strange to them as the jungles of South America.

If you go to college, what does rural life really have to offer you? There is a real brain drain as well in these Midwest states. Their best and brightest go to college and relocate to the coasts and other big cities. Entrepreneurship suffers as a consequence and as populations dwindle everything suffers (you need a critical mass of people to be able to sustain a town).

Rural folk may be upset about being left behind but who's really to blame? I'm a bleeding heart about a lot of things but man, I put the blame purely on the government's of these rural counties and states and the people who continue to elect them. They are desperate and hungry for better lives but to think it has come to this... Trump may very well be the last president we ever elect. We have elected a complete neophyte to a position that requires the most skill utmost skill out of anger, fear and disgust at each other. God help us if we go to war.

Everyone should bow to to people who live in urban areas. Then I will laugh as the people who have chosen a rural existence one day decide to not wake up at the butt crack of dawn and harvest food for the urbanites.

You don't need a critical mass of people to sustain a town. You need the dedicationa and support of people in rural areas who chose an agricultural career. How many days of food do you think there is in the average city?

Your shit stain of an attitude is what is wrong with America.

 

[Sunburn74]

Everyone should bow to to people who live in urban areas. Then I will laugh as the people who have chosen a rural existence one day decide to not wake up at the butt crack of dawn and harvest food for the urbanites.

You don't need a critical mass of people to sustain a town. You need the dedicationa and support of people in rural areas who chose an agricultural career. How many days of food do you think there is in the average city?

Your shit stain of an attitude is what is wrong with America.

Lol what flame bait. As if people in cities don't work hard too and make meaningful contributions. I don't really have much else to say to you if you can't grasp the meaning and implications of the word town.

 

[werepossum]

Most manufacturing hasn't left. We are manufacturing more than we ever have before.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us...utput-has-doubled-in-three-decades-2016-03-28
Global consumption is just increasing faster than our manufacturing is increasing, leading to even greater increases in manufacturing in countries like China. The concept of a basic income won't work if we are just off shoring all the jobs because then our productivity as a nation would be falling. Basic income is based on the idea that we have increasing productivity as a result of automation. As robots do more and more of the jobs, particularly when the jobs created as a result of automation aren't the types that can be done by just any individual, then it begins to make sense that a basic income is needed, probably coupled with a shorter work week because it is still good for people to be working, and as hours at jobs accessible to the majority of the population become more limited, it makes sense to make those hours accessible to more people.

Those of us in the small towns of the South, Midwest, and Rust Belt states pass by the shells of old factories every day. They aren't full of robots. Yes, we still manufacture a lot of things, but outside of refined oil products and aircraft, even most of what we manufacture is in large part Mexican or Chinese components. Peel off the "Made in America" sticker of any light fixture and you'll find that the LEDs, drivers, sockets, etc. are all made in China. Put it this way: Automation allows much more to be produced with fewer man-hours. The freed-up man-hours allow us to produce things more cheaply, and thus we can consume more. However, those additional manufacturing jobs went to China, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam . . . basically anywhere that labor is cheap. We haven't even managed to maintain parity; we've lost manufacturing jobs in hard numbers, not percentages of population, and those jobs have moved to other nations.

 

[Exophase]

Here's an idea, if the jobs have left your area, move. I've moved for every job I've had. If you don't want to move when the jobs leave your area, no one owes you a job. When market for coal jobs collapsed due to the invention of the long wall miner, it was time to move away from the coalfields. That was thirty-forty years ago. Factory farming cut the number of farm jobs and buncher-fellers cut the number of timber jobs, again, move. If folks are looking to government to fix this problem, they shouldn't be surprised to find government in their shit.

The problem, which the article touches on, is that the cost of living is so much higher in the larger cities with the attractive jobs. It's especially hard if you don't have a university degree, but getting one is also a huge financial risk and challenge for someone who didn't plan on it early.

What I think would be nice to see is more companies opening offices in smaller towns along with cities that have lost their major industries. Historically there have been good reasons why everyone moved to cities for work - it was a lot more efficient to collaborate with people and move important goods around, and they were situated closer to long distance trade channels (hence why so many are near the coasts). But today more and more industries are becoming less dependent on geographic advantage and proximity to each other. I work in government contracted tech (in Cleveland, an ex-big manufacturing city that actually has had somewhat of a tech market spring up), and we've done pretty well working with people from across the country.

I am at an utter loss as to why so many tech startups feel they must take root in San Francisco when their work could be done pretty much anywhere, and I do think people would move for the opportunity because the risk is so low (and contrary to popular belief, some people actually like rural life, even some millennials)

There was that story a while back about the woman who was fired from Yelp after slamming them for not paying her more for her call center job. Their response was to move it to Austin where the cost of living was cheaper. Good start, but I frankly don't see why you can't open a center like this basically anywhere, especially when the local population can fill most of the jobs. Start building offices in smaller towns when you can afford to and the status of those towns will likely gradually improve.

I wouldn't put the onus on government to make this happen, but some state and federal supplied incentives (tax breaks, loans/grants, etc to migrating companies) may not be the worst thing in the world.

 

[OverVolt]

Automation hits diminishing returns of efficiency.

Is it energy-efficient to have perfectly able bodied humans sitting around doing nothing and eating food while machines do everything, also consuming energy.

Not really, IMO.

Modern agriculture methods are great from running a large corporation standpoint but farming land by hand has actually always been a more effective use of the land. Less food waste. Less water use. Etc.

Basically cities are reliant on the dwindling Ogallalla Aquifer and the circular farm fields all over the midwest.

California complains it contributes so much in tax revenue that goes to red states but when you give the red state a subsidy they actually produce something, like food.

 

[agent00f]

I can tell you. "We love him because he's a billionaire and he doesn't have to do this"

Actual quote from someone.

"Can you imagine he's a billionaire and he's coming to save us?"

Okay the "save us" part is embellishment.

They think he's noble because because he can live the rest of his life in luxury and not need public office to make his millions. What they forget about is ego. A guy that rich has everything he wants. What do you get a guy who has everything? Something to boost his ego. What better way than to run for and win the highest office in the world even?

If that's the case there's no reason for him to cheat/con small contractors out of what are pennies to him.

People like that are always after more money, and he just got the office of the US presidency to leverage.

 

[agent00f]

A lot of people seem to have quite a few of the misconceptions that were talked about in the cracked article. People don't have a good understanding of what rural life is like, what people in rural communities value, and most importantly why Trump was elected by this group. I voted for HRC, but most of my family didn't. And the reasons are fairly obvious, even, if you don't agree with them.

1. Rural communities are primarily republican by tradition. The republican party has supported farmers on national and local levels, and supports states and small towns having more control over their government instead of federal bureaucracies. This matches the values of people in rural communities, who believe in self reliance and the importance of community and family support..

2. Small towns view their self reliance as a point of integrity and look down on many of the groups who seem to be looking for handouts or special privileges. At the same time, they have lost many of their manufacturing jobs to either outsourcing/automation or industry consolidation and horizontal integration. Most of the people in rural communities do not have any problem with people of another race or religion living in the USA, but they do resent special treatment and long term welfare, and lawbreakers who will not pay their fair share (illegal immigrants) when they have put up with so many losses in their own communities.

3. Most people in rural communities are not stupid. They view both Clinton and Trump as corrupt politicians who will not deliver on even half of their promises. The reason they chose Trump is because he has spoken about issues like free trade agreements and illegal immigration that impact their lives and said he will address them. Furthermore, Trump has not been a politician, and these disenfranchised voters have continually been seeking someone-anyone-to address the serious corruption of our government. Trump's message in each area that he visited was tailored to address their ongoing problems (tariff of 30% on every car Ford produces in Mexico and imports/10 foot wall to keep illegals out/return to family values and keeping the government out of religion/etc.), while Hillary's was one of supporting the socially oppressed and dealing with international issues and long term problems like global warming and the international economy.

The reason Trump won is because Hillary appeared apathetic to the real results of corporatism, automation, and international trade, and the harm they have caused in small communities.
In this thread, many people have posted misnomers about these very issues. Someone who has had their job displaced cannot easily choose to pursue a new career in a different field in many cases. They would have to return to school, which is ridiculously costly, to get the education they need, and then they may have to uproot their entire family to find a job somewhere else. This often means moving away from extended family, as parents, grandparents, cousins, and others often live in the same small town. These are real costs and risks, and democrats haven't offered any solutions. Extending unemployment means these people may survive but have to take a government handout.

Farmers are supported by 'subsidies' in many cases, but the issue is not anywhere near that cut and dry. The USA needs fresh produce, and even if the government did not offer subsidies produce shipped from other countries would in many cases have degraded by the time it hits store shelves. Subsidies also allow greater transparency and accountability through FDA tracking. And subsidies and crop insurance ensure that the USA is not beholden to another nation for something as absolutely necessary as a stable food supply. If there were no subsidies then the prices of fresh goods in grocery stores would go up substantially, and many small farmers would be forced out of business when there were bad crop yields.

The perception of moral superiority in small towns is a result of the news cycle. We hear about crime and protests in bigger cities all the time, while it is very rare in smaller communities because everyone is forced to get along and work together. And the crime is on a scale that seems absurd for a town literally 1/1000th the size of a city, in some cases.

The debt is also a very important issue to these people because they in many cases view bankruptcy as a sign of failure. If Hillary had spent more time hammering Trump on his failures and questionable business practices like Obama did to Romney, she could have made headway against him. But she didn't.

Hillary was unquestionably the better candidate, but she was taking the country down a path that would lead to more suffering for these voters, and not offering them a path to a better life. At least Trump spoke to these people and addressed their suffering.

People with talent have options, and generally don't choose to live in bumfuck nowhere making chump change.

I was going to compose a longer reply to the cracked piece, which is a composite of others they've published before, including one specifically on the rural/urban divide, but ran out of time so this'll have to do. The talent in the red areas move to the coasts, and that brain drain only exacerbates the problem.

Because of that migration pattern, I would argue that the rural/city divide is not a cause as cracked posits, but a symptom of inherently different kinds of people now living in each. Put another way, the sort of people who generally follow tradition/loyalty stay in the country, and the thinkers inclined to progress gravitate outward. This correlates nicely with party and left/right ideals.

Of course the way people are raised play a role, like the religious staying religious. But we increasing live in a society where folks make their own choices, and there's no turning back the clock on the rate that this migration and differentiation is happening.

If this pattern of bumpkins fucking over people with choices and money continues, it's only matter of time before a divorce gets put on the table.

 

[sxr7171]

While the government can't necessarily solve this problem alone, they can certainly help with it. They can work to increase education opportunities for rural America. They can provide incentives for companies to expand in rural areas where they enjoy cheaper operations. We are seeing this in some areas of rural Oregon. Companies like Amazon are putting their server farms in rural towns, and its a huge boost for the area. Wind farms and other alternative energy industries are also ideal for rural areas (you can't really put a big solar farm in the middle of a city). But rural areas need to accept that these are the types of jobs that will restore money to their regions. Not lumber jobs, or ranching, etc.

As for all the rural jobs going away, not likely. So long as people want to live in rural communities, there will be rural jobs. Do you think guiding services will be automated? Forest management? Farming? Ranching? By the time these jobs are all automated, I'd say all the urban jobs will be automated as well.

I agree that education opportunities need to be increased in rural areas but you also have to look at the take up. You pointed out rightly that the current kinds of jobs like lumber or steel or mining are gone. It takes a certain resiliency to channel your skills to a new field and knowing the mindset of people who choose to stay in these areas it's going to be hard. You could argue that if they wanted to keep up the standard of living of their families they would have considered relocating for work.

I won't disagree with your premise about the rate of automation. It's going to take a long amount of time. My point is that rural communities as we know them might not be viable. You can drop server farms on these places but how many actual people would be needed to staff such a highly automated operation? Maybe 20? Is that a community? I see it almost like an oil rig, just drop 20 people in there and cart in all your supplies. Would such a town need a physical bank? It can be done online. Can 20-100 people sustain even one fast food restaurant? You're mentioning things which are highly automated like wind farms. Those will not save communities only prolong them until such time that only the server farm is left. Those sectors need land not people.

Once we are so automated that a basic income is needed then people can live where they want assuming they can afford to have their stuff shipped over to them.

But until then these places will have to shrink as they have been for decades. It wasn't that long ago that more than 50% of people were employed in rural areas in the agricultural sector. Right now maybe 15% of the population lives in these areas. Why? Farming is already automated. It will continue to shrink that way. Someone else made the excellent point that many modern jobs require a certain population density and a certain critical mass of people in an area.

There are rural jobs and its the same story as the cities and in fact its even more stark. In a small town it seems maybe a 100 or people make all the real money: the doctors, lawyers, brokers, business owners and everyone else is working at near minimum wage or generally kept under $50k with no real room to grow that outside of getting to city for either more pay or more experience or both. At least in the cities you can still see people in all parts of the income spectrum. No doubt the disparity is huge even there but at least there are jobs that go above $50k to around $150 to 200k. In a rural area you have to be one of those professional people or business owner to crack a certain income.

The jobs I think that will be last to be automated are the trades like electrician or plumber and healthcare because ultimately its a human contact thing. Robots might do the surgeries and even make the diagnoses and dispense medications but a person would be needed to talk to/reassure the people and double check the robots' work. I just don't see robots going in and figuring out an existing wiring installation and getting in there and drawing wires and doing the connections. The complexity of such a robot going into a myriad of homes and businesses and repairing things would be too high and thus too expensive. They would be great maybe for new electrical installations where the whole system is designed for robots.

Urban jobs especially creativity and collaboration based jobs are pretty immune from robots. We might get Watson to come up with a recipe or even create a cartoon series but it would generally be terrible. Those people who choose to work would be rewarded handsomely. Thus everyone would want such jobs but there wont be enough to go around and the world would be split even further into employed and non working. This would only increase income disparity.

The supply of labor already exceeds what we need that's why so many are unemployed, underemployed and have dropped out of the labor market altogether. That's also why a large proportion of jobs are basically minimum wage or minimum wage plus $2-10.

 

[sxr7171]

If that's the case there's no reason for him to cheat/con small contractors out of what are pennies to him.

People like that are always after more money, and he just got the office of the US presidency to leverage.

Trust me you can't explain these things to these people. It's all about emotion. I'm just repeating what I heard. My main rationale in posting that is to dispel any notion that these are racist, rednecks. They are far from that. They are civil, decent people if a bit simple and set in their ways.

If anything the ruffians are the ones looting and rioting right now in the cities. I can say without any reservations that had Hillary won these people would not have ravaged their own towns. They may be poor but they are nothing like city people think of them. They are certainly more principled than to make up stories to get sympathy.

The characterization of these people is so far off the mark I had to say something and if liberal city folk are actually open minded as they claim they are welcome to hear it. It's the same in the cities with emotion, except most of the vocal ones are highly privileged spending $60k a year to go to university to cry. They could not understand the sheer economic despair that would cause them to seek out this solution to their real problems. There is suffering, real suffering in these places. It's not some lame joke like oh I got called dirty x,y,z by person of a,b,c race and they said it because of my race. It's not that they saw a word on a wall and decided to call in thousands of dollars of therapy to get over it.

I'm sorry but I've seen both sides of this and the whining coming from the cities is over the most petty stuff I can imagine. First world problem whining at it's finest. No doubt there are systematic issues of unfairness in the cities too, but this whining over words and graffiti and some made up oppressor is insulting to people suffering whether right here in the first world or in the third world. On top of the whining the accusations that these suffering people are racists and bigots is just too much to keep quiet about.

I think people need to step back and just take in some perspective. I'm all for a utopian society but can we focus on real suffering first and then we'll tackle name calling afterwards.

 

[sxr7171]

All of these things still require a labor force. The easily automated jobs are already gone. Appropriate environmental regulations would bring back some of those, but I agree, these jobs in general aren't coming back. However, you are incorrect to state that almost everything besides land costs more. Housing is cheaper, labor is cheaper, energy is cheaper. You can live comfortably in most rural areas for $50k a year in a nice home. In conversations I've had with people from the tech industry, the reason they have trouble expanding into rural areas isn't because of cost. They all agree they could greatly reduce costs. The reason is they can't get a high enough density of qualified workers in these communities. The rural communities that are able to meet these needs are doing really well. A neighboring rural county has recently had server farms from both amazon and facebook go in. That area is doing extremely well because they have embraced allowing high tech jobs in their rural community. Even my county has benefited significantly recently from wind farm installations. The problem is a lot of the rural communities are only content with lumber jobs, mining jobs, and ranching jobs. It isn't that rural communities have to disappear, but they will have to adapt.

Again it's down to mindset. These are generally people who are set in their ways. The ones who are not generally left or excelled where they are leaving a whole bunch people with low paying jobs. Even you just said labor is cheap there. It is. It's pretty much minimum wage for everyone else. These are the holdouts they don't want to adapt. They just want the 60s back.

They want the job security they had back then - a level of job security that even talented programmers in the cities can't have anymore. They want it doing whatever they always did. They may be misguided about economic reality but they aren't bad people like people want to paint then as. They are just less adaptable.

Even if you put a data center in the biggest gainers will be the guy that owns the land followed by the local construction magnate and then the 20 highly paid network guys that had to be brought in. What really do the locals get at the end of the day?

You can put in a Walmart just the same and get 20-30 minimum wage jobs at best. Maybe one manager or two gets a decent job with benefits.

And really how many of these tens of thousands of communities can even get that server farm or wind farm? How many people does it take to run a 100 windmills? Far from a community. In terms of wages we might be looking at an extra $500k a year? What's that to a town of 20,000 people? Nothing burgers.

 

[Thump553]

Wait, you think that Hillary would oppose the oligopoly? She IS the oligopoly as much as any candidate to have ever run. From broke to vast wealth with the help of her friends.

Regarding cities vs. rural, I don't have a problem with a small area determining what happens within it's region but when it decides everything for everyone within a state where it makes no sense makes no sense. That's where a lot of resentment come from.

My big problem with Trump-and I'm sure a lot of thinking people feel the same-is not so much his stated philosophies, which are very few, extremely vague and often contradictory. It's that he seems to think at most one or two steps at a time, has no concept of unintended consequences, his factual foundation is almost total BS based on the internet equivalent of a supermarket tabloid.

An ill informed, narcissistic, rash and judgmental leader may be acceptable for North Korea or it's like but not for the country that is currently the dominant power in the world. And a cabinet who's core is Giuliani (talked about for Justice), Gingrich (talked about for State) and Christie-well we are well on the way to the most partisan Cabinet since Nixon and the most corrupt since the second half of the 1800s.

I think a lot of people voted for him for the same reason GWB won-they felt he'd be a great guy to have a drink with while he ran against someone who was a stiff of a personality.

As far as oligopoly promotion goes, that's been the central function of his entire life-he knows how to game the system inside and out, and promotion of his personal and family wealth is the number one concern.

I pity the people who actually believed the fantasy he is going to bring small town manufacturing back. We can't compete against countries that pay pennies per hour no matter how protectionist Trump gets with his tariffs. Never going to happen except in isolated instances, no matter who is president.

 

[agent00f]

Trust me you can't explain these things to these people. It's all about emotion. I'm just repeating what I heard. My main rationale in posting that is to dispel any notion that these are racist, rednecks. They are far from that. They are civil, decent people if a bit simple and set in their ways.

If anything the ruffians are the ones looting and rioting right now in the cities. I can say without any reservations that had Hillary won these people would not have ravaged their own towns. They may be poor but they are nothing like city people think of them. They are certainly more principled than to make up stories to get sympathy.

The characterization of these people is so far off the mark I had to say something and if liberal city folk are actually open minded as they claim they are welcome to hear it. It's the same in the cities with emotion, except most of the vocal ones are highly privileged spending $60k a year to go to university to cry. They could not understand the sheer economic despair that would cause them to seek out this solution to their real problems. There is suffering, real suffering in these places. It's not some lame joke like oh I got called dirty x,y,z by person of a,b,c race and they said it because of my race. It's not that they saw a word on a wall and decided to call in thousands of dollars of therapy to get over it.

I'm sorry but I've seen both sides of this and the whining coming from the cities is over the most petty stuff I can imagine. First world problem whining at it's finest. No doubt there are systematic issues of unfairness in the cities too, but this whining over words and graffiti and some made up oppressor is insulting to people suffering whether right here in the first world or in the third world. On top of the whining the accusations that these suffering people are racists and bigots is just too much to keep quiet about.

I think people need to step back and just take in some perspective. I'm all for a utopian society but can we focus on real suffering first and then we'll tackle name calling afterwards.

Let's preface this with the fact that I used to live in the south and drove throughout that rust belt. The republican, or accurately conservative (ie formerly dixiecrat) politics of that region correlates well with aforementioned resentment. Of course nobody admits to racism per se anymore for obvious reasons even if they weren't hot on desegregating not long ago; that spite for the liberal media & education doesn't come from nowhere. However it's worth crediting that area with better integration today than many others due to way segregation collapsed. Schools are actually rather diverse (I attended them), which bodes well for the generations educated in them. To elaborate, it's much easier to villify races you don't know, so know one black guy and he's the good one. Get forced to know a lot of black people and that resentment preached by conservative agitprop gets a lot more confusing to simple minds.

Moving on, that many other places mentioned very much includes the rust belt, with very clear separation of races in many towns. I've seen far more cases of blatant racism here than the deep south for reasons just explained. It should come as absolute no surprise to anyone familiar with it that Trump's message about mexicans and muslims, and the political correctness which makes it inconvenient to hate resonates so well here.

Remember again that core Trump support is hardly poor at >70k household income, not even by first world standards. They're the ones with most of the remaining "good jobs", trying to keep it that way by staying on top of the social pecking order round those parts.

People who correctly judge that Trump isn't even qualified to run for dog catcher have every right to be very displeased people like that voted him to be their president. Their money is being wasted on massive white welfare for these fake jesus followers who revel in backstabbing the hand that feeds them.

This is what telling it like it is looks like, not that "these are great god-fearing people we shouldn't dismiss" bullshit being proffered by weak liberal cucks after getting fucked up the ass yet again.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

My big problem with Trump-and I'm sure a lot of thinking people feel the same-is not so much his stated philosophies, which are very few, extremely vague and often contradictory. It's that he seems to think at most one or two steps at a time, has no concept of unintended consequences, his factual foundation is almost total BS based on the internet equivalent of a supermarket tabloid.

An ill informed, narcissistic, rash and judgmental leader may be acceptable for North Korea or it's like but not for the country that is currently the dominant power in the world. And a cabinet who's core is Giuliani (talked about for Justice), Gingrich (talked about for State) and Christie-well we are well on the way to the most partisan Cabinet since Nixon and the most corrupt since the second half of the 1800s.

I think a lot of people voted for him for the same reason GWB won-they felt he'd be a great guy to have a drink with while he ran against someone who was a stiff of a personality.

As far as oligopoly promotion goes, that's been the central function of his entire life-he knows how to game the system inside and out, and promotion of his personal and family wealth is the number one concern.

I pity the people who actually believed the fantasy he is going to bring small town manufacturing back. We can't compete against countries that pay pennies per hour no matter how protectionist Trump gets with his tariffs. Never going to happen except in isolated instances, no matter who is president.

I have no doubt that Trump isn't going to deliver, but it occurs to me that this was a "Hope and Change" vote. Hillary wasn't offering anything, just an extension of the status quo. Between a longshot and nothing, people picked the former. More people than not disliked both candidates for a number of reasons and many may have picked up on the fact that no one offered hope in a real and substantial way.

Trump hasn't the mental agility to think outside of the box, and Hillary is entirely plugged into the oligarchy for her fortune and pretends she is not. But any hope is better than none and she was not an inspiring figure for anyone but the hardcore partisan.

 

[agent00f]

I have no doubt that Trump isn't going to deliver, but it occurs to me that this was a "Hope and Change" vote. Hillary wasn't offering anything, just an extension of the status quo. Between a longshot and nothing, people picked the former. More people than not disliked both candidates for a number of reasons and many may have picked up on the fact that no one offered hope in a real and substantial way.

Trump hasn't the mental agility to think outside of the box, and Hillary is entirely plugged into the oligarchy for her fortune and pretends she is not. But any hope is better than none and she was not an inspiring figure for anyone but the hardcore partisan.

To the contrary, Trump has the developed cunning to probe an audience's emotional soft spot for exploitation. That's very much outside the box for traditional/principled politics, even for establishment conservatism, which is why he can win where they lose.

For example, he can tell you that between the billionaire who inherited it and a self-made woman you don't like, the latter is the oligarchy candidate; and you'd believe it because that feels so right emotionally.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

To the contrary, Trump has the developed cunning to probe an audience's emotional soft spot for exploitation. That's very much outside the box for traditional/principled politics, even for establishment conservatism, which is why he can win where they lose.

For example, he can tell you that between the billionaire who inherited it and a self-made woman you don't like, the latter is the oligarchy candidate; and you'd believe it because that feels so right emotionally.

What I meant by "outside the box" was in regards to novel approaches to problem solving for things like good and secure jobs. From the perspective of success in getting to where he is now, I have to hand it to him. He managed to play and effective parasite on the Republican machinery, tricking it into accepting him as one of them, which the host recognized too late. A very effective virus.

 

[agent00f]

What I meant by "outside the box" was in regards to novel approaches to problem solving for things like good and secure jobs. From the perspective of success in getting to where he is now, I have to hand it to him. He managed to play and effective parasite on the Republican machinery, tricking it into accepting him as one of them, which the host recognized too late. A very effective virus.

He won where they could not, so I'd imagine they would be more than happy to evolve using his dna.

 

[Mursilis]

Its worth a few minutes...

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/

Great article - thanks! I lot of people are really suffering out there.

 

[K1052]

Automation hits diminishing returns of efficiency.

Well it hasn't hit that yet and there are a lot more jobs going out before we do. My brother in law works for a large equipment manufacturer and automation/autonomy is the focus of basically all R&D. This is true of every industry and even on the service side of things.

 

[TeeJay1952]

Seems like most of you folks haven't been reading Time magazine over the last 40 years. Automation and Globalization and Redistribution of Wealth have been the focus of countless articles. It is like you guys are hearing about this stuff for first time. Interesting times.

 

[IronWing]

Well it hasn't hit that yet and there are a lot more jobs going out before we do. My brother in law works for a large equipment manufacturer and automation/autonomy is the focus of basically all R&D. This is true of every industry and even on the service side of things.

At the Mining Expo in Las Vegas last month, automation and robotics were everything. Cat announced its integration plans with Trimble for total mine automation. Cat also rolled out its long wall mining system for hard rock mining. Hitachi had its new autonomous shovels and pure built autonomous trucks (no driver cab, no human controls). The newer, deeper mines are too hot to support humans so robots are the only choice.

 

[K1052]

At the Mining Expo in Las Vegas last month, automation and robotics were everything. Cat announced its integration plans with Trimble for total mine automation. Cat also rolled out its long wall mining system for hard rock mining. Hitachi had its new autonomous shovels and pure built autonomous trucks (no driver cab, no human controls). The newer, deeper mines are too hot to support humans so robots are the only choice.

It's pretty amazing how far this stuff has come and how far it will continue to go. Entire industries will end up basically fully automated in the coming years.

If Trump manages a miracle of forcing all component manufacturing back to the US whatever few jobs (people thinking a 1950s GM plant versus the reality of something like Tesla today) that brings will be utterly swamped by losses to technology.