spanish protest\riots live footage
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Soldato
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I understand that but it doesn't seem to affect ethnic business owners. Of course visiting a tourist location won't give you the full picture of the Spanish economy but when I last went on holiday the only shops you could guarantee would be open in the day were the ones run by Africans and Asians. The ones owned by the Spanish always closed in the day (handing over 100% of business to the immigrant workers/shop owners effectively) and even when they did re-open in the afternoon it was still only for a couple of hours before closing again whilst again the shops owned by immigrants remained open.
If you visit areas outwith the touristy places, there are only Spanish shops in the main. Especially in rural or moutain villages. It is the culture, which arguably becomes stronger and stronger the further you go from the built up urban areas..
Although in the cities yes I have witnessed what you are talking about, but that tends to be for the smaller shops. Shopping centres for example don't close. There are no generalisations to be had, because how businesses react to siesta are different. Bars and restaurants for example have very busy and profitable lunches. It isn't as easy for a family to get home now with commuting distances becoming longer and or further, it isn't this blanket butterfly effect many seem to have this impression it is.
A few years ago we had afro-carribean cleaners - these days all the cleaners in our office are Spanish... am wondering if I'm soon going to start seeing Spanish & Greek people handing out paper towels and spraying aftershave on people in London nightclub toilets.
Caporegime
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Considering 80% of Spain is asleep during those hours that only the immigrant shops are open... they aren't handing over much if any business at all actually.
Business is dead in the early afternoon, you have a more productive workforce if they aren't working during the hottest worst part of the day. Also business stays open late and they simply have a different culture over there.
I really don't know when people will wake up, we live in a worldwide economy that works on everyone working their hardest for everyone to have enough to live, but every single year for basically 100 years we've needed less people per capita in every industry.
My go to example, it used to take 100 people a week to make 2 cars, 5 people keeping an eye on 100 robots can make 5000 cars a week. Sure the demand has gone up massively, but the amount of work require per car has dropped through the floor. The number of soldiers required to wage a war, the number of street cleaners needed to clean a city, the number of packers in warehouses(Amazon is HUGELY automated), the amount of farmers per tonne of a vegetable produced due to greenhouses, pesticides, hydroponics.
There are massively more people but a massively reduced number of jobs for said people.
The economy can't and won't survive on the principle of everyone working. every single country worldwide is losing industry jobs and piling on jobs paid out of tax from an effectively shrinking tax income.
It simply DOES NOT WORK, it will never work, the only way it could work is if we get rid of every computer, robot and advanced manufacturing technique so we randomly create more jobs.
We need a new way of thinking, basically, communism or, at least, not a society based on greed.
Imagine the world we'd live in if everyone job shared, everyone worked half days, and had more time to spend with family, kids, to learn, to read, to play sports.... you know, where everyone can be happy rather than 5% of the world being able to live off their parents riches and 50% of the world work two jobs just to feed their kids.
We need population control and a MASSIVE change in world wide culture... neither are going to happen any time soon.
Soldato
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What about the people who make and maintain those robots? Whilst those robots mean the factory needs less workers, in turn their invention creates a whole new industry and jobs that wouldn't exist before. The robots don't make, maintain or market themselves.
Associate
Then you've created hundreds of jobs at the expense of thousands.
Capitalism is inherently flawed; If you assume that all people are greedy (which they're not, putting decent people at a disadvantage), then you accept that the people at the top are only going to be willing to spend money to make money.
Given a finite amount of money, in order to have a trickle down economy, those with money are going to need to be giving some of that up. Since this is contary to the fact that everyone is supposed to be greedy, people with money are unwilling to part with any, thus the trickle down doesn't happen without someone failing.
The Americans especially like the system because with some "hard work" anyone can make a push to the top. The reality is, the deck is stacked, and the easiest way to make money is to have money, and those with money have all the practice, education, and opportunities in order to be successful.
Until the system changes, I can only see the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and I don't know how the game can really finish any other way. Course I expect this to be protracted over many years, since none of us have any real control, I'll hope I can become one of the ******* at the top.
Soldato
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You do realise you are making the disproven Luddite argument don't you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddites
Associate
How so?
Holy cow, DM's made it away from the football forum
He's been in the F1 threads this season... It's been a novel addition
Soldato
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Because you are making the Luddite argument. Did you not read the article?
We've been having this debate for hundreds of years, it wasn't invented with the car building robot. Every single tool ever invented has put someone out of work and yet we still have employment (and will continue to do so despite technological advancements).
Associate
Well, I'd actually prefer you to explain it, starting with what I said exactly, and how it is a fallacious argument.
you could go back to a time when a large % of the population of this country spent most of their waking hours farming small plots of land....
you really don't see why requiring less manpower for any particular task will free people up to do something else and allow us to progress as a society?
perhpas we should just go back to working in fields and living in basic huts... any innovation or progress from that state should be seen as bad because it would cost agricultural jobs
Associate
Actually you're making the same assumptions regarding my statement as he is. I neither said nor suggested that technological advancement was a negative thing, I merely stated that the jobs directly created by automation (in this specific case) do not make up the numbers of positions replaced.
On the contrary I think automation is great, however if you'd like me to expand on my belief, I don't honestly have the expectation that if we automate everyones jobs that we'll always have a 1:1 ratio of new jobs to replace the old. You could argue its sorta linked, but I'm hardly making the same argument, and I definitely didn't with my previous post.
We have a lot of hit and run merchants on this forum who are all too happy to jump out of the woodwork and tell you whats wrong with what you just said, but I'd actually like to hear the evidence (or at least a reasoned argument for once) disproving my opinion beyond "its not happened yet" and attributing opinions to my words which just weren't there.
To go back to my actual point, I believe society will have to change eventually, as it has in the past, as it will no doubt do many times in the future. I don't really have a time scale for that, nor do I believe thats a negative thing.
With any luck the people of the future will job share, and people will get paid more for doing less, being more efficient, and being happier with more free time. It may never happen, but the last 150 years doesn't exactly prove that it won't.
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I think the robot issue would work itself out pretty quick. The robot inventors/owners/operators would still have money to buy stuff from each other. They could even build their own robot armies. Everyone else would eventually die off from starvation.
You will still need people to own the land, fix the robots and control them. There is enough land on earth that it would be quite a large number of people, perhaps 10 million.
You are already starting to see it in American farming for example. What used to take hundreds of people can now be done by 1 guy with a GPS controlled auto-steering tractor. I've driven through the deepest farmland of the USA and it's extremely sparsely populated, it's like being on a terraformed Mars or something... really weird but I quite like it actually. That's what the future would be like.
You will still need people to own the land, fix the robots and control them. There is enough land on earth that it would be quite a large number of people, perhaps 10 million.
You are already starting to see it in American farming for example. What used to take hundreds of people can now be done by 1 guy with a GPS controlled auto-steering tractor. I've driven through the deepest farmland of the USA and it's extremely sparsely populated, it's like being on a terraformed Mars or something... really weird but I quite like it actually. That's what the future would be like.
However if you take that idea to it's conclusion, an free market economy based on robotics and automation, eventually somebody would invent a robot or AI that can automate the job of inventing robots. Then there would be no need for humans AT ALL.
I just had another thought, eventually that AI robot which invents other robots would run out of tasks to invent robots for, and would invent a robot body for a human mind. So humans would then download their conscious minds in to robot bodies which don't need food or medicine or anything a human needs. It could have say a nuclear power source that lasts eons. Then we would have no need for the old robots at all because we have no "needs".
Then there would obviously be a space war between us and the unemployed AI robots protesting our austerity measures.
Then there would obviously be a space war between us and the unemployed AI robots protesting our austerity measures.