January 31, 2014

Fla. poll: Clinton leads Bush, Rubio in matchups (2016 Presidential match-ups)

Interesting... There is very little electoral math that can grab an electoral win without Florida for the Republicans...

January 17, 2014

Robots are stealing your job: How technology threatens to wipe out the middle class

...Automation is destroying jobs, but in contrast to past history, new jobs are not being created in adequate compensation for what’s lost, (a point all too well underlined by the latest jobs report). “The Second Machine Age” reexamines this relentless march of the robots, but in the context of a technological landscape in which change is accelerating significantly faster than what could even have been imagined just a few years ago.

The emergence of Big Data, the exponential growth unleashed by decades of Moore’s Law (more and more computing power for less and less cost), and the logic of what the authors call “recombinant innovation” — the mixing and matching of our powerful new tools into a bewildering array of even newer, even more powerful tools — have replaced hype with a bewildering new reality. We’re headed somewhere new at high speed, and with no apparent ability to put on the brakes... The key economic fact is that technology can make the pie bigger, it can make the economy richer, but it doesn’t necessarily help everybody, in fact some people, even the majority of people, can be made worse off, even if the pie grows bigger.

That’s not what happened for the past 200 years, with the first machine age, but it does seem to be what’s happening now. In the second machine age we have a bigger pie but also more concentration of wealth. The median income is now lower than it was in the 1990s... http://www.salon.com/2014/01/17/robots_are_stealing_your_job_how_technology_threatens_to_wipe_out_the_middle_class/

This article really plays into the economics I have been spending time thinking about lately. What if we no longer have an economy that can be based on unit labor (i.e. automation makes work value too cheap)? The two biggest political/economic systems of the 20th Century were Capitalism and Communism... At their heart, both these systems are based on UNIT LABOR. This is also part of our problem... as a society, we simply don't know how to organize ourselves yet. No system can give us guidance. The center cannot hold...