(06-20-2018, 03:33 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I worked in factories myself, actually. I'm sure that their decline did not happen because boomers didn't want to work there, or were guided not to work there, or because they preferred to indulge in the awakening. They did not go away because boomers were encouraged to avoid them. Trump is trying, in his misguided way, to answer the desire of Rust Belt people to bring them back. But companies have shut them down and moved them overseas for cheap labor. Some might come back, but not all; we are a global economy now. And somehow cheap labor has to end; and I think it will as third world nations get richer thanks to our companies giving them jobs. But meanwhile, the computer geeks, the other line of roboticism I mentioned, has turned factory work and much other work over to robots. So now ready-made jobs to avoid poverty are going away. What will replace our income, if the CEOs who profit from robotic efficiency aren't required to share the benefits with the rest of us? Our conservative friends tell us that high tech will create new jobs, but it's a cinch they will require more education. Meanwhile, shouldn't there be more support for artistic vocations that don't readily pay a living wage? There are many other kinds of activity that inspire, help and teach people.
An honest day's pay for an honest day's work should be readily available in a healthy economy. Honesty also means that one gets to be true to the dictates of conscience so that the work is not itself a fraud (as with bamboozling people into doing things contrary to their best interests).
I believe that one solution is to heavily tax the proceeds of robot production and economic rent so that we can provide a basic income for everyone. If one wants more, then do some work. Someone will have to buy the stuff that robots make; the robots who produce copies of recorded music and video won't be buying them. Someone must.
Quote:Yes, and yet people have been far less prosperous in earlier pre-industrial times, and yet were able to create and were supported in their creation of arts far greater than anything created today; both folk art and royal, church and aristocratic-supported art.
Art is not done for the money, but prosperous people can buy art. Paupers generally do not buy it -- or fall for mass-produced Kitsch.
We are becoming so productive that we can no longer afford mass poverty that will destabilize our economic order. .
Quote:That, and the idea that we have all these abilities to experience and share great treasures, but create none ourselves, or not as much, because all the attention is given to the means of transmission and not to the content. And the newest means of transmission seem to cost more too.
Technological advances in innovation and improved production techniques tend to make things cheaper and better. The real cost of a 65" flat-screen TV today is much lower than that of a color TV from the 1950s with a 15" screen and expensive cabinetry and tubes that needed frequent replacement. One possible use that I can imagine for one of those old TVs is as a stand for a new one. (OK, it would be fine in a place like Michigan that gets no severe earthquakes, but not California that gets them).
Of course, much of the direction of our current economy is to ensure that through privatization, monopolization, and price-fixing, people pay far more for what they get. Cable-TV providers are a prime example, although blame often goes to providers through which cable TV is a conduit. Where I live, one needs cable because I am 70-80 miles from any broadcast antenna. But most television is schlock, anyway. I can ask anyone whether a TV screen has ever been part of any peak experience -- and the only time in which it has been has been in watching the returns of an election in which I had a personal stake. Hiking in Isle Royale, Yosemite, or Great Smoky Mountains, or hiking some dunes along the only part of Michigan that at all resembles coastal California -- I had no use for any electronic device. Watching a sporting event? OK, I can't afford tickets to the World Series, NBA or NHL playoffs, any NFL game, the Masters, the Byron Nelson, the AT&T Pebble Beach Tournament, or the Olympics, so TV becomes a surrogate.
The apparent objective is to get people to pay more for whatever they get, whether in higher rents, new or increased highway tolls, increased taxes to support crony capitalism and enforce its will through wars, cheapened public services, destruction of the welfare system, and of course, pay cuts. This raw deal is much like feudalism -- the common man gets nothing more than what his lord or master deems fit and necessary for him, which implies being treated like livestock. But feudalism implies medieval technology and a nasty legal system. High technology in the service of and enforcement of feudal inequity? that's fascism.
Quote:Well, that fine but flawed president was a Boomer/Xer cusper and I always maintain he has both traits. I hope we get another such cusper president during this 4T.
More likely in the 4T, although we may still get someone resembling S. Adams, Disraeli, Lincoln, Juarez, Garibaldi, FDR, Churchill, Gandhi, or Mannerheim. If we do end up with a cynical and callous leader who gets us into deep trouble then we might be facing one or more enemies like S. Adams, Lincoln, Juarez, Garibaldi, FDR, Churchill, Gandhi, or Mannerheim and experience a great national defeat that becomes or precipitates a liberation. Just imagine what California would be like if history inverts World War II with a MacArthur-like figure laying down the law on the West Coast -- but that figure is Japanese. (But that is part of my projected alternative history of World War II if the Germans and Japanese are the Good Guys defeating a Klan-dominated America in 1945. I attribute the defeat of the fascist powers to the cruelty and exploitation of Evil Empires that could never be at peace with the peoples that they conquered).
I expect Obama to be a model for X pols against whom they will be compared. That will be a tough comparison. Undoing the damage of Donald Trump and George W. Bush will be tough and thankless.
Quote:I don't think Gen Xers are as creative as Boomers, nor Boomers as creative as their war baby Boom/Silent cusper elders. Music in particular has done nothing but decline since Gen Xers have been the creators and arbiters of taste. TV and movies have declined and become more tasteless and obscene too. And it's the spiritual and political agenda that powered much of the inspiration of the awakening, and it's from that time that the best arts and pop arts of our time come.
I have seen Generation X students early in my sojourns as a substitute teacher, sometimes in art, and I have seen more creativity among X than I would expect based upon doctrine of Howe and Strauss. That of course is some years ago, as X is fully outside the educational system except as teachers and administrators. Boomers seem less creative (and the youngest ones turn 58 this year and the oldest have turned 75) than the Missionary and Transcendental generations. In music alone, who is 'our' Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, Jean Sibelius, or Igor Stravinsky who really were well known before age 58?
Quote:The economic policies have hurt all generations, and we all face the consequences of that lobbyist government. But I don't doubt that Xers were hit harder than Boomers, and Millennials hit harder than Xers. As I said though, X had the advantage of less competition from their populous peers.
X had to compete with the GI Generation trying to stay active in the workplace in their late 60s and early 70s, the Silent, and Boomers. Competition among themselves was fierce among early-wave X.... and it never really let up.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.