The enormous amount of immigrants (both legal and illegal) to the US is definitely a huge factor.

They say the current population won't do the unpleasant jobs that immigrants do because the pay is too low. It seems no one has stopped to consider that those jobs pay so low because there is a seemingly endless supply of cheap immigrant workers to do them. It drives wages down and provides little incentive for automation.

The ancient Greeks invented the steam engine but never really used it because they had no shortage of slave labor. There was no incentive to further develop that technology.

When was the last extended break you had and how long was it?

Take a good chunk of time off with zero computer, technical or online stuff.

When I quit my old job earlier this year (after being burnt out hard) I was able to take 3 weeks off before starting new gig at smaller start-up-ish company. I used ZERO electronics and such over the 3 weeks. No programming books are anything like that.Was finally "refreshed" when I started the new job.

Automation like this is why I call BS on the "we need more immigrants to keep the economy going!" folks.

We will be struggling to keep our existing population employed. The last thing we want to do is import even more low-skilled labor who will soon be made redundant.

Increasing automation means a declining population is a godsend rather than a problem.

Policy makers must be aware of this. I suspect the call for increased immigration are politically motivated (replacing the existing population with a more reliable voting block) rather than sincere economic concerns.

This recent article is a great example. The author gleefully explains how replacing the existing white population with immigrants will reduce the NRA's base.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/10/19/...

> The last thing we want to do is import even more low-skilled labor who will soon be made redundant.

This is the lump-of-labor fallacy. More immigrants means greater demand for labor (and other goods and services), not just greater supply and results in net job creation and wage increases for native workers. Automation isn't likely to change that, because the demand for labor is not fixed.

Import? We are not importing them. They migrate here because there is work. If there is no work, they won't come over here. It is basic supply and demand that is controlling this.

From the perspective of the elites who encourage unchecked mass immigration to drive down labor costs and secure reliable voting blocks "import" is quite accurate.

You had me agreeing until the part about the NRA base going down with increased immigration. Now I'm all for it.

The government should dissolve the people and elect a new one, then? Even as a joke that's in very poor taste.

> Purposeful demographic replacement of white people to achieve political ends. Lovely.

Why is being white so important? What's the difference? If the difference is no NRA, sounds like a decent trade to me.

>Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist. So just to be clear, you have no problem with ethnically cleansing a nation to change its political disposition?

What? You're insinuating we're going through a White Holocaust and I'm apologizing for it. You gotta be out of your mind. "Ethnic cleansing"??? Take a breath and realize you're comparing concentration camps to people migrating for a job. What a sick way to trivialize one of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

> Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist.

Exactly, or "white" with "American Indian" or "aboriginal" and you can see exactly how people in the past supported such atrocious policies.

It's scary how far some people will go to achieve political goals.

I'm a bit confused about why you (seem to) think that is a good analogy?

One wrinkle that might be part of your idea is that instead of comparing the act of promoting immigration to the act of genocide, you are instead comparing the defense of promoting immigration to a denial or approval of genocide. Perhaps this is what the analogy is based on?

However, I expect that you are aware that many people distinguish between killing members of a group or preventing them from reproducing, against just outnumbering the group? Some people tend to distinguish between those.

Another thing, you use the term "ethnically cleanse". The association's people generally have for that term usually include an active eradication. Not just ending up being in the minority of the population. Similarly, due to the word "racial" in the phrase, people often interpret it as referring to an act of effecting in a targeted manner those of some specific "race".

most People would generally not describe the act of dropping fat man and little boy as being acts of "racial cleansing", though they did result in the drastic decrease of a population of a particular ethnicity in a region. People are more interested in the number of deaths that occurred, and other damage done, than they are on the impacts on the population of a particular ethnicity.

For most people to consider something to be intended as "racial cleansing", they generally have to consider the the intent behind the action to be motivated by "racial" things, not just the action to happen to have an effect on "racial" things.

Let's put aside the admittedly inflammatory rhetoric. Are you arguing that if the government decided to peacefully change the population's demographics in order to make a currently unpopular political goal more achievable in the future, that would be okay?

Because that's about the most anti-democratic thing imaginable. In a democratic society it is absolutely, unconditionally wrong for the government to do such a thing. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around!

No, I'm not really arguing that.

I'm mainly just arguing against the comparison to racial discrimination/eradication.

I agree with your point that replacing the people so that some different things will be voted for is harmful and undemocratic, at least if done by the government.

But the problem would be in corruption, basically, not genocide, as the one I responded to claimed, and I think that is an important distinction to make.

Bad arguments for things one agrees with should be refuted as well as for ones one disagrees with.

Although, a limitation on my agreement: many potential actions by a state could influence the population in an area in a way that might change how the area votes. I think it would be generally not a good idea to forbid all such actions, because that would only make it such that the impact of how it is set up does not change, it would not make it so that it does not have an effect. That's not to say that there shouldn't be protection against changes that would cause a harmful change in voting population, just that not everything that incidentally would have a change to voting population would be inherently bad.

In the end, I think, it should be the choice of the population as to whether the govt takes some action which could impact the composition of the population, provided that there is no other reason which it is either obligatory or impermissible to take the action in question.

If the population freely chooses an action which will impact the way they make future choices, it seems to me kind of like a person , for example, drinking alcohol, or taking a mind altering substance, whether it is a medicine or a harmful substance.

Unless the action is forbidden (such as, for example, an actual genocide) or obligatory (not sure of what an example would be here.) , the population would choose whether to take an action which would change itself.

Edit:

Something I thought of just after sending that:

Consider woman suffrage. That was a decision which influenced the collection of people who constituted the voting population. I think it was a good decision.

OK, then. I think a lot of people here got weirdly hung up on the nature of the demographic change, as if the skin color of the people affected somehow affects its morality.

With regards to women's suffrage, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the constitution after extensive public debate, overwhelming approval by Congress, and approval of a supermajority of state legislatures, exactly as spelled out in the Constitution; it also had support among the public. That was the epitome of a change effected in the proper democratic fashion.

So if the OP had said that he was glad the black people in his city were being replaced so that he could get better support for his pet political issue, you would have no problem with that?

Somehow I doubt you would say that in polite company.

What do you mean by replaced? Are you referring to an active specificly targeted removal, and replacement, or are you referring to an action which happens to cause a change in the proportion of ethnicities?

I've already said that I believe that the people should decide whether to take an action that would change the voting population, not just a decision by a single person,

And yes, an action that specifically targets people of a specific ethnicity would be a bad thing,

But not every action which has an influence on the demographics of an area wrt ethnicity is taken with the intent of influencing the demographics of an area wrt ethnicity. The influence can be incidental.

The thing I'm contesting is not that it would be appropriate for a government to cause more immigration in order to change voting patterns. Rather, I'm arguing against trying to make the topic be about ethnicity.

Are you totally unaware of how blatantly racist this is?

You are equating the encouragement of immigration with the systematic murder of a population. This means that you are either very stupid, or motivated by the virulently racist notion that an undirected, gradual reduction of the demographic status of white people is somehow lamentable. kmicklas did you the favor of presuming you're not stupid.

Undirected? Our elite are encouraging it.

There are countless article published in mainstream media telling us why less white people is a good thing. "White guilt" is pushed heavily.

Can you imagine if the OP had said he was glad blacks were getting replaced in his town because it would help his pet political issue?

No one said "white". They said "immigrant". Incoming people of all colours are less likely to be pro-NRA than the average multi-generation American.

I can't prove this, but I bet it's true.

And the vast majority of immigrants are non-white.

So if the immigrants were required to have proportions roughly the same as current population proportions you wouldn't have a problem with increasing population for the purpose of changing political opinion?

What makes you think I would agree with that? Doesn't follow.

HN is no place for racial flamewars. You've taken this thread disastrously off-topic. Please stop, and please don't do it again.

> Automation like this is why I call BS on the "we need more immigrants to keep the economy going!" folks.

This is a bit of a shortcut (and most don't realize it) to "more people doesn't necessarily mean less jobs to go around, as available work is not a finite product because of the amount of artificial demand an increased population can create".

We don't need more human drones; when properly funneled, increased immigration can mean a better economy.

> We don't need more human drones; when properly funneled, increased immigration can mean a better economy.

Agreed. Importing millions of unskilled laborers is insane as automation picks up. Those jobs will be made redundant in short order. (They probably already would have been, but a massive pool of cheap labor meant little incentive for automation. Similar to the first steam-engines being unused by the ancient Greek ruling class http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/HeroAndLoon.htm)

Bringing in the select best and brightest from other countries is certainly wise though.

Or bringing in more, and training people better. But this applies to the entire population through a better education system of course...

But as I stated regarding my point about automation, we don't need more people, we need less.

We already spend more than any other country per pupil. Many of the "broken" school systems have received massive influxes of cash (billions) and seen no improvement what so ever. Schools can only go so far it seems.

2 Billion spent in Kansas City to fix the schools. No appreciable result. I'm not convinced in the panacea of education. Something else is at work. The by country PISA scores are quite interesting.

What about the immigrants in high-skilled labor?

The recent calls for increased immigration are mostly about STEM-trained immigrants, are they not?

Vast majority of immigrants are unskilled.

Letting in a few of the best and brightest from other countries makes sense. Importing millions of central/south American peasants is idiocy.

The calls for restricted immigration are certainly politically motivated (mainly variations on "I don't want them getting mine") so what's the difference? National borders mean less and less all the time. Clinging to them to weather this upcoming economic storm is like using an anchor as a liferaft.

Almost no one in the US is calling for restrictions on immigration.

Really now? No one? [edit: You added almost, I can almost agree now ;)]

Tougher border control is restrictions on immigration. Why do you think various billionaire nutjobs want to build a great wall of mexico?

No, it's not. It's enforcing current immigration policies.

Moving towards an open borders would be changing restrictions on immigration.

That's not true. The border has always been open for people to pass freely for centuries. Restricting border crossings would be a change in immigration policy. I don't think it's necessary.

We already had gov't, taxes and social programs. It may not be apparent to you, but homesteading on indigenous lands was a social program. I'd love to see if you could make 4X the salary and 2X the quality of life by migrating to another country if you'd change your tune. I hope your rigid rules of society always apply to you and your descendants.

But I'm guessing you're ok with the folks who migrated to North America. Just not ok when those same people move around their own continent.

So why not let the entire population of Africa move to the United States? Borders are an antiquated concept according to you.

Why not let the entire population of California move to Rhode island?

Wait, who is preventing the entire population of California from moving to Rhode island?

I'm not aware of any regulations that forbid anyone from moving to Rhode island from California, except for things like house arrest or other things requiring someone to stay in one place.

Just because borders are open does not mean that people will immediately move.

That said, CA and RI have similar quality of life, but Africa and North American probably do not. So CA/RI is not a good example.

I think those numbers don't add up. Decreasing population does nothing for the per capita need for working-class people. Unless you think laborers are dying off at a greater rate than the rest of us.

Just noting it doesn't matter how our 'native' population grows or shrinks - we'll have about the same available labor supply per capita. In fact as we push education, our labor supply shrinks as the next generation aspires to more than lawn maintenance.

Yes I agree...instead of importing low skilled labor, we should import highly skilled immigrants. Increasing the H1B and employment based greencard quotas is absolutely necessary.

Never thought about it this way but there is probably a lot of truth to it.

Older people have had people trying to feed them bullshit for much longer. They know what it tastes like. They can smell it coming.

Of all the software places near me, the ones that are known for 60+ hour weeks exclusively target young, fresh out of school candidates who don't have the experience to know they are being treated like crap.

The idea of blue-collar workers getting well-paid is very upsetting to some white-collar workers. They feel their social status threatened by people they deem beneath them.

I don't think that's the primary issue people have with high wage union labor, and your comment shows an unwillingness to engage constructively with political opponents.

Unions are a monopoly, and when prices (in this case, of labor) are high due to a monopoly, we must ask whether the government should allow, forbid, or encourage this monopoly. When wages are very low, I think most people are not opposed to unions forcing wages above market rates (I am, but that's another issue). But when wages are high, or driven far above what people think market wages would be, people question the moral basis for protecting workers from competition.

So the issue isn't that blue collar workers are "beneath" white collar workers, but that (at least to an industry outsider) it's not clear what special skills these workers have that would command high market wages.

Let me just ask you: why, in a market system, shouldn't people get as wages whatever they can demand, using personal negotiating skills, collective negotiating skills, law, whatever?

Management won't leave money on the table, why should the workers?

You had me up to "law". From the econ perspective, the "free market" does not include lobbying for particular laws. To define it as such is mockery of the term.

Assuming completely free property rights and contracts, unions would probably have almost no power. The power of unions stems from the fact that they are protected (e.g. you can't fire someone for joining a union) and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it (but as far as I know that's not the issue here, I'm just mentioning for completeness).

I think that a legal system that is skewed towards labor is ok, for various reasons. But when you see wages pushed far beyond market wages, it's fair to ask if the system is too skewed.

So to answer your question, a person should not get whatever they can command by influencing the political system. Yes, both sides will try to do it, but in both cases the response should be to argue against them, and instead argue for impartial laws.

EDIT: the delay before the "reply" link becomes active is there for a reason. I'll respond to any reply that I consider to be based on a thorough reading of my post, and not a knee jerk reaction (for reference, the reply I'm referring to was written 4 minutes after my post).

Of course the free market includes the rules that govern it. If you don't have rules, you don't have a market, just a rule of anarchic might-makes-right force.

If you're going to say "well, only property laws then," that's still laws! That's still a set of "this is how it should be" encoded into rules that we all have to agree to to take part in it!

It's just been, for so long, assumed that "screw the workers and don't let them fight back" is somehow "more free" that we treat that like a built-in thing, when really, that's just one way of doing it.

As for state-sanctioned, union-committed violent crime, oh please.

EDIT: Since you edited your remarks to include the last paragraph, I'll address that, too.

Why shouldn't people work to influence the political system in their favor? We all live here, we all have a role to play in the design and operation of the laws of our city/state/country. If enough people like strong worker protection laws, well, that's democracy, why shouldn't that stuff get encoded into law?

SECOND EDIT: Yeah, it only takes a minute or two to read what you're saying and respond to it. I saw a "reply" link right away, so if there's some extra delay built in, it didn't apply to me.

First, I was out of line in my edit. It's not for me to say how you should post on HN, so I apologize. I'll stick to the addressing the content of what you wrote.

The difference in our viewpoints seems to be that you have an "adversarial" understanding of the political system, where different interest groups try to get the best for themselves. On the other hand, I think that politics is mostly driven by ideology, not self-interest. If I can state an ideal set of laws, that should be sufficient and I don't need to concern myself with how special interest groups might try to manipulate the set of laws.

I also think you conflate self-interest with what is right/wrong when you say " If enough people like strong worker protection laws, well, that's democracy, why shouldn't that stuff get encoded into law?". Do they like it because they think it's right, or because it's good for them? That's an important difference.

On the specifics, I mostly believe in the free market. I don't consider the free market to be anti-worker (redistribution through taxation/welfare handles that aspect) or arbitrary. Classical economics shows that the free market should be considered the default position. I also support limited rights for unions, e.g. I don't think an employer should be able to fire you for joining a union, because the employers control of how people communicate in the workplace could be considered an unfair advantage.

Re violence, do you disagree that union members do sometimes commit violence against so-called scabs, when they attempt to enter a worksite? And do you think that in general these acts are punished in the same way that other violent acts would be?

>and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it

It is absolutely absurd for you to say this, when unions and workers attempting to unionize have and still continue to be slaughtered for their attempts to gain basic human rights at their workplace.

I would say such a misstatement is laughable but it would be poor taste to make comedy of the deaths of so many.

This is what I was referring to: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/08/22/why_do_w...

Can you give any similar examples of violence against unions, say within the last 20 years and in the US?

Your constraints are inappropriate for a world where capitalism is global. If you drink Coke or wear Nike you're directly supporting the murder of workers attempting to unionize and their blood is on your hands.

But, even in the US union organizers are frequently suppressed, either violently or through indirect threats and intimidation. It takes little scholarship to discover this and the absence of such indicates that you're more personally interested in having an argument, where you fight for your side to be considered correct, than actually learning, where you observe evidence in a nonbiased way and integrate that evidence into your beliefs. So it would make little difference for me to give any "similar examples" of the (utterly biased and as other commenters have pointed out, incorrect) source you've provided.

As another aside, it takes a special sort of person to, in the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, side with the powerful as you have here. I hope you contemplate this as you decide what person you are in the future.

Let me first say, I appreciate the spirit in which you're keeping this going; we're civil, we're responding to things, it's great! It's how online chats should be.

I read that article, you're right, at first glance, it's pretty troubling. Seeing the source (one of the oft-propagandistic, oft-badly-sourced Real Clear sites) made me want to follow up on the claims inside.

The Ohio man who was shot, it isn't clear from any authoritative reporting what actually happened--the only people who explicitly link his attacker to a union are secondary sources. It also looks like the authorities were in fact working on it, though I couldn't find any sort of follow-up reporting.

The rest is all so vague that I can't really make a lot of sense of it.

That said, of course I don't condone violence, neither petty vandalism (like leaving debris in the Verizon driveways), nor the economic destruction left behind when multinationals bend laws in favor of offshoring, and then do so, and leave entire towns with no source of employ.

Neither of those is right, but I don't think we'll get to the right place by trying to come up with one "right" set of laws that every person and every business must abide by--I think we'll iterate closer and closer to "right" when people and groups work together to make their slice of the world better.

It's just that, the entire time I've been alive, the working folks and the poor have been under the bootheel of a variety of--excuse the language, I can't really think of another way to be succinct about it--oppressors both large and small, whether it's the people who ship factories overseas to save some bucks (and bend laws in their favor), or the managers who willingly accept just-in-time staffing solutions that leave their workers with unpredictable work schedules, or the managers who cheat workers out of overtime by classifying them as "salaried," or the managers who try to normalize 100-hour work weeks, or ... on and on and on. We work a lot harder for a lot less, and we're still on course to work even more, for even less.

If a union's a way to bend that downward slope a bit, I'm all for it. No historical evidence suggests that less regulation would do it.

Anyway, thanks again for keeping the discussion going in a courteous, engaging fashion.

Unfortunately I don't have time to go into this more, but I also appreciate the tone of your reply.

A very brief summary of my position is that there is a set of "right" laws, and that is the free market with redistribution through taxation. This is not an arbitrary choice, but one justified by classical economics. Anything good for the poor that you would want to accomplish would be better done by redistribution than by unions. Except, of course, pleasing the members of a particular union, who might stand to benefit at the expense of other workers if they could increase their power.

Outsourcing a great example of this. It is actually good for people in the countries where work is outsourced to. They get more for their labor than they would otherwise, even if they get less than what a Western worker makes. If they showed "solidarity" and demanded Western wages, they would get nothing.

I think the problem is that in this case the "market system" is not a free market system, since the ILWU has a monopoly protected by regulations, which they somehow managed to get implemented.

Is that a good thing? Consider that the handling of each container costs $300, about double what it does in say Rotterdam. Who pays for the difference? The American consumers.

Or suppose all the fast food work was, by law, under the Fast Food Worker's Union. They demand that their members pay is equal to the ILWU, $227,000 inclusive of benefits per annum. Now a Big Mac meal cost you $15. Does your argument still hold?

And consider also this: such unions are often cesspits of nepotism and corruption, usually manifesting as union not admitting new members without some special considerations.

My issue with union shops is that getting things done is unnecessarily difficult. Case in point: sitting around for half a day waiting for the unionized cable puller to sling a single cat5 connection between two racks on the same row in a data center. Then the guy doesn't show up until after 1600, so he forces overtime.

Funny you mention that. When I was a teenager I earned pocket money by running cat5 cable through buildings. In this case it was professional licensing, not unions, that made what I was doing illegal. I think professional licensing is even more pernicious than unions, since it operates entirely through manipulating the legal system.

This is especially true when unions are actively sabotaging the introduction of new technology in order to maintain their high wages or inflated numbers (introduction of containerization to Oakland).

Unions aside, there was the same butt-hurt regarding blue-collar oil field workers making 100k+. The New York Times ran endless articles complaining about the shale oil boom.

Non-elite flyover whites making good money seems to really upset a certain segment of the population. How dare they make a better living them me doing physical labor!

Most people have been taught to look down on blue-collar manual labor. Seeing them makes good money upsets them. Even the OP expressed his distaste for the oil-field workers.

Fair point, I thought you were saying before that critiques of union workers earning too much were really driven by this white vs blue collar issue, while now I see that what you were really saying is that the OP wasn't necessarily even talking about unions, just complaining about rich blue collar workers.

In fact, before I saw the rest of the thread I was going to ask for clarification about the original oil-field worker point.

I agree that manual work can have a high market rate even without unions, e.g. if it physically requires a very fit man to do the job, in addition to the right personality, dexterity, intelligence and reliability.

Indeed. I don't disagree with you about the Unions at all.

You do realize the sentiment behind the second clause of your last sentence contradicts the assertion of the first one?

Could you flesh that idea out? It's not clear to me what parts of the sentence you're referring to.

> So the issue isn't that blue collar workers are "beneath" white collar workers, but that (at least to an industry outsider) it's not clear what special skills these workers have that would command high market wages.

You say the issue is not one of considering blue collar workers to be inferior ("beneath"), but your second clause implies that if blue collar workers do not possess "special skills" "that would command high market wages" then something is "not clear", i.e. the blue collar workers would be "lower" without those "special skills".

This presumes blue collar work and workers are inferior to white collar work and workers because blue collar workers need "special skills" to be equivalently compensated/regarded.

EDIT: qualifying condition for last sentence.

Ok I get it now. I think a natural reading of my statement is that the original post was claiming some cognitive bias, in which white color workers felt themselves to be inherently better than blue collar workers, vs my own view that white color workers on average are actually worth more in the market.

My claim is that there is no cognitive bias, but that white collar workers in general are worth more (because they possess a rarer set of skills).

I think the difference is the seemingly artificial restriction on the supply of labor, and the assumption that if there are qualified individuals willing to do the work for less cost, they should be allowed to do so. If the employers are blocked from hiring these others by those who are currently employed, this strikes many people as unfair to both the employers and to those willing to do the work for less, as well as to the public who in the end bear the extra costs of the inefficient labor market.

The presumed difference with white-collar work is the assumption that this pool of willing and qualified workers exists. Maybe it doesn't? I'm guessing that while there are many people who could be trained to be excellent computer programmers, but I doubt there is a significant pool of ready-to-go programmers in Oakland who are being blocked from employment by the current programmers currently holding a limited number of positions.

Lots of people don't like that engineers are well compensated in the tech industry also. Look at all the company shuttle protests in San Francisco.

And yet they never protest at the homes of the executives who decide how much tech workers are paid.

They could have an an amazing project here but fail solely because their name is already used by much more well-known projects.

30 seconds of googling could have prevented this.

More feeling of accomplishment because lifting increases testosterone much more than cardio.

Lifting has the added benefit of increasing bone strength which is very important for men and women who develop osteoporosis more frequently.

Video does not play on either Firefox of Chrome.

Can someone post a transcript or the gist of his message?

Basically says big data = three Vs.

Volume - you have too much data, Velocity - it's coming at you too fast, Variety - it's coming from too many different places,

But then he goes on to talk about specifics and gets strangely cut off.

It was cut that way on purpose.

"Are beer sales affected by weather?" is an example of a question that is solved by Variety, which is the the last concept he was talking about.

>he claimed that his wartime work was really motivated by a desire to work on space travel.

Reminds me of Gerald Bull.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Bull

He just wanted to build his space gun. He had no qualms about building artillery for Saddam Hussein if it meant his efforts would get funded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXgtNqCe9Ko

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun

You probably want to adjust your expectations -- hard things are hard. The article talks about concrete freeways with faded white lane markings -- those are common in California, and as a human, I have a hard time seeing the lane markings.

Humans use road markings to help drive/navigate, why shouldn't a car?

The car using them is fine. Their absence alone causing failure is worrisome.

What do you think the car should do when it can't see any lane markings?

Would also be interested in knowing what you think it does right now, in the failure scenario we're discussing.

The point is that lots of roads don't have visible lane markings. If the self-driving mode doesn't work correctly with out them then it won't work on many US roads.