The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

[flintlock]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

There's is no guarantee that higher productivity = higher pay. There is no inherent progression there.

Exactly. Higher productivity does not always equal better quality of life either. Even though we may have more "STUFF", not everyone sees that as a positive thing.

[flintlock]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

Too bad they haven't invented a machine to replace politicians. We could program out all the hypocrisy and corruption.

[Mashuri]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

Exactly. Higher productivity does not always equal better quality of life either. Even though we may have more "STUFF", not everyone sees that as a positive thing.

Since value is subjective this may hold true on an individual level. However, unless one is a self-sustaining Luddite, every individual benefits by having the necessities of life available to them (food, water, etc) at a lower cost thanks to capital advancements (farming machinery, water pipelines, etc).

[Starving Steve]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

I would stock up on what you can, b/c food deflation is unlikely to last given a meeting w/an ag analyst that I sat in on recently, where the meat of the conversation was thus:

“As long as we have the 2^nd highest corn yield & 2^nd highest corn acreage ever, and exports to China don’t increase, & livestock feed usage declines, & ethanol usage doesn’t change, we won’t run out of corn next year.”

There are limits to trends, ofcourse. Natually, the price of food can not de-flate for long. But I am amazed to see how much food prices have dropped and how much better food tastes. Food is also more nutritious now.

When I was a small boy in Duluth, back in the early 1950s, here was the selection of food available: green and bitter grapes, spam, kosher sausage filled with animal fats
and smoke-flavouring, canned vegetables, ketchup or catsup or cat soup, chicken soup made with fat called "smaltz", tongue, ham, broccoli, creamed-corn in cans, tuna in cans, candy, liver, beets, borsht (beet soup), canned peas, and rye bread. Needless to say, I rarely ate!

About the only thing good to eat in Duluth was smoked-trout from Lake Superior, but that wasn't often available. Lake Superior smelt was good to eat when smelt was available. The rye bread was also good. But that was all that there was to eat.

When I lived in Winnipeg in the 1970s, people ate similar foods to what I had to eat in my early childhood in Duluth. People throughout North America ate sh*t and "loved it" until the advent of NAFTA...... Now we all eat well, and food is cheap, everywhere.... Our diets now are rich: meaning not in rich fats and flavourings, but "rich" in a whole variety of fresh fruits and fresh vegetables. We eat less meat now, and that is also healthy. We also now eat more rice and spaghetti, and we no-longer have to eat out of cans.

There used to be such a thing as "canned spaghetti", but I think canned-spaghetti is gone now. Spinach used to be in cans, but I think that is gone now, too.

Prisoners on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay rioted in the late 1930s because they were served canned spaghetti, day-after-day. When you visit Alcatraz, the U.S. National Parks Service will tell you what happened: The prison installed tear-gas cannisters in the prison's cafeteria to subdue prisoners who would riot. The cannisters would drop-down from the ceiling.

[Mashuri]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

I would stock up on what you can, b/c food deflation is unlikely to last given a meeting w/an ag analyst that I sat in on recently, where the meat of the conversation was thus:

“As long as we have the 2^nd highest corn yield & 2^nd highest corn acreage ever, and exports to China don’t increase, & livestock feed usage declines, & ethanol usage doesn’t change, we won’t run out of corn next year.”

Corn should have a much higher price than it currently is. Talk about one the most subsidized industries in the U.S. Corn is a classic example of government distortions of the free market. There are plenty of (better, IMHO) substitutes for ethanol and corn syrup, for example, to handle market demand -- even more so if government lets the public keep the $$$ it's wasting on subsidies.

[ggirod]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

When I was a small boy in Duluth, back in the early 1950s, here was the selection of food available:

That sounds very bleak. At the same time, here was what I remember of foods at the same time and but a couple of hundred miles to the south....

May was the occasion to search for water cress and a meal including it in a salad. June first brought copious rhubarb from the garden for fresh consumption and freezing (late 50s) followed by fresh strawberries and we would visit a farm to buy quart upon quart fresh from the morning's picking. Shortcakes, sauce on ice cream, and occasional strawberry-rhubarb pie used them up. The final pickings were cleaned, packed, and frozen (in the mid-50s and later) for a wintertime treat. Scarcely did the berries disappear and it was time for the fresh vegetables from another farmer. We visited once a week to stock up on fresh beans, peas, lettuce, sweet corn, etc. Incidentally, they lived off grid and we would talk into the evening until after they would light their kerosene lanterns. They really enjoyed our visits and we did too. A third farmer provided melons of all sorts in abundance and we went at least once a week throughout the summer for the melons and then squash in season. Squash, of course, keeps quite well in the basement so we had squash well into fall and Thanksgiving. A bit of butter and brown sugar added make an incredible treat. One weekend the word would travel fast and we would go to Wisconsin to get raspberries from the Native Americans who braved thorns and significant pain to harvest them. Once we got them home, they became jelly for a special treat the rest of the year. With August came the peach harvest train from Washington/Oregon which blessed our small town with a carload of peaches and later, pears. Word traveled fast and my mother swooped down on the fruit market to buy the fresh fruit in wooden crates and take it home. Every day it was canning time and the shelves in the basement filled up with canned peaches and pears. Of course, fresh peaches that didn't dribble down our chins found their way into pies, ice cream, and various puddings. Pears mostly got canned for consumption in the winter months. Wood from the peach and pear crates became project material for a boy with a jig saw and lots of Elmer's glue... Tomatoes from various sources also found their way into canning jars. Sweet Potatoes showed up in the markets from the southern US, and we had them repeatedly for a month or two. Now, everybody recognizes sweet potatoes are nutritionally excellent, back then, they were just a yellow vegetable (oh, that is probably the same idea, but simpler, somehow.) Then, of course, apples came in and my mother canned lots of applesauce and sliced apples. They similarly provided variety in the winter. Of course, fresh apples also went into delicious pies, cobblers, and school lunch bags. Autumn was also time for the whole family to go out into the countryside (farms, cemeteries, parks, and just general woodlands) to pick up nuts by the bucket full. Walnuts, butternuts, and hickory nuts were the most memorable, but I think others were around too. The nuts, of course, went into cookies and various other dishes.

Then ... snow .... In the winter pretty much whatever we ate was canned ... Lots of store-bought canned beans, corn, peas, spinach, and other veggies. While they lasted, fresh squashes were still available and carrots, onions, and other root crops lasted longer. Lettuce and other fresh foods were scarce and people just didn't serve them. Once in a while the table was graced with some iceberg lettuce and celery was somewhat common. Pea salad, a concoction of American Cheese, canned peas, and dressing, and carrot salad (with grated carrots, raisins, and dressing) fulfilled the "salad" needs. A chicken cooked up thoroughly became fried chicken with gravy and biscuits one night, leftovers another, and chicken soup or casserole was made of the bones, etc. at the end. Farmers with laying hens would provide the markets with occasional "stewing hens" that were incredibly nutritious, rich, and very tasty in the many dishes they spawned.

Meats were available year around ... and we ate far too much of them. I don't remember Spam at all, but ham was common and all sorts of ethnic sausage was available from the Poles in MN and the Germans in WI. Duluth probably had some, but less selection, I would guess. Winter meals more commonly featured fresh warm rolls to accent the simple flavors of the other foods, and, of course, potatoes and gravy were a major staple. Toward spring, the canned food stash of tomatoes and fruits came out more often for variety and then summer was signaled by rhubarb and strawberries again.

The quality of life in those years depended crucially on one person full time taking care of the family while the other brought home "the bacon" ...Were my family to have depended on what was available in stores back then, the experience might have been largely what Starving Steve reported. With a full-time quality of life manager, (aka housewife) a knowledge of what comes in when, and a heck of a lot of canning jars, things could be much better.

Massive unemployment, peak oil, and economic collapse may well de-construct the food production and delivery system which you so treasure. Those who depend on the food market for fresh produce on demand may find that their experience is not unlike what you had in Duluth. On the other hand, those who garden for themselves and support their local food producers may be able to thrive with a good quality of life. During the season, crops like fruits, sweet potatoes/yams, and other seasonal products may be widely available to those who know what to look for.



Those who figure out how to grow/acquire food and preserve it, and those who become seasonal opportunists and gorge themselves on the glories of each season's fresh bounty, may not find the new world to be much of a problem at all.

Those who don't may have little to look forward to than freeze dried food and spam.

My Coleman gasoline stove will power a canner outdoors where it is cooler and more comfortable in summer to can foods. I also have a propane backup and finally wood is plentiful if needed :-) I hope my garden will provide a lot of produce but I am more than happy to get produce from the farmer's market and preserve it. Some things are just not practical for me to raise and I will happily buy them. Next year is my pilot for rhubarb, strawberries, peppers, and tomatoes, so wish me luck :-)

Free Range Chickens are a major temptation but I suspect I would only feed the coyotes and wolves, and absent eggs and/or drumsticks my motivation might flag a bit.

[touchring]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

This is theory. In practice, the unemployed people will be forming armies and make money by plundering. Banditry is also a job. ;)

The long-term trend ( the mega-trend ) is that everyone in the world is going to be unemployed. Robots and machines will do everything, and do everything better.

Detroit is the future: better cars and cheaper cars with fewer defects, produced by robots. Duluth is the future: more grain, more iron ore, more tonnage shipped, and almost no workers at all. But this is just the beginning........

In San Jose-Santa Clara, California, the canneries were torn-down decades ago. Then came the geeks, and now the geeks are fast-disappearing. Those who sit drinking lattes on University Avenue in Palo Alto or in Los Gatos may soon disappear, too.

"Time marches on." (S.S. may have the last laugh.)

[c1ue]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

Many times it's as difficult for humans as well.

I see the involvement of machines as increasing the living standards of humans by an entire order of magnitude. We are and will remain essentially awash (at least in the "developed" countries) in the "basics" and create an ever-growing demand for skill and labor in maintaining/repairing/building ever more complex machines. It's no labor-less utopia, but it beats the hell out of any previous era.

Don't get me wrong - I absolutely agree that machines have improved the everyday life of humans.

However, the vast majority of this improvement has already come through:

1) Automation of steel production/processing
2) Automation of farming/harvesting/food processing
3) Automation of cloth weaving
4) Electrification
5) Railroad transport

Beyond this, however, the gains are increasingly illusory.

I've studied in detail the actual economic performance of 1st generation robots in Japan, for example.

Many of the benefits were due to overly optimistic expectations of both maintenance as well as longevity - both in function and in utility.

Even just 5 years after installation, the actual improvement over a worker was minimal - at 10 years it was highly negative.

The reasons were simple:

1) those selling the machines told those buying the machines extremely optimistic stories on durability

2) those buying the machines did not expect the generational changes at that time (early/mid 90s) where 5 to 7 year lifecycles for model families would segue into 3-5 year lifecycles. Life cycles now are 2 - 3 years.

3) the cost of maintenance even beyond breakdown rose far beyond any expectation on either side. In this case it was the FORTRAN/Y2K problem: once the 3rd generation beyond the machines sold came out - the number of qualified repair personnel and the supply of parts evaporated such as either cost orders of magnitude more than expected.

[Starving Steve]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

People used to eat plenty of bacon; the fatter the bacon, the better it tasted. And people used to eat mayonaise. Salads were even made of mayonaise with peas. Luncheon meats, loaded with fat, were a staple of the diet. Also, canned-herring was a popular food, and it still is in some countries to-day. We also used to eat yellow mustard, so bitter that you could vomit. Horseradish was popular; it came in both red and white variety. And yes, we used to eat yams (sweet potatoes). Corn-on-the-cob was available in summer, but it used to be rubbery and yellow in colour, with large kernels.

Duluth did have fresh wild berries, but they grew and were available only in August. (Summers in the Lake Superior region are quite short, as you know.) Winnipeg did have porogies which were fried in lard and tasted great, but they were not heart-healthy. Cottage-cheese was another popular food, and it remains so to-day.

We did get water-melon from Texas, but the watermelon had huge black seeds to help you choke-on. To-day's watermelon is sweet and delicious, and it has very few seeds. Any seeds that are in to-day's melons tend to be tiny. To-day's watermelon often comes from Mexico. So thumbs-up to genetic-engineering and to NAFTA !

To-day's blackberries come from Mexico, and they are naturally sweet. Blackberries used to be bitter, and they were grown in the U.S. or Canada------ Isn't that interesting!

And then there used to be canned lima-beans and canned string-beans..... Everything was in cans and came with a tin-taste, or a vinegar taste, or a salty taste. Horrid!!!!

One food that was good, no-mind the heartburn, was kosher dill-pickles. Those came in bottles, and they still are popular to-day.

Don't ask me about gaffilti-fish: horrid, but still popular with old European Jews........ Thank God for Taco Bell!

When my grandparents first encountered Mexican food in Tucumcari, New Mexico, they were in culture-shock and refused to eat it. (I remember that night back in 1957 quite well!)

[Starving Steve]

Re: The competition is not foreign workers, it is machines

Since value is subjective this may hold true on an individual level. However, unless one is a self-sustaining Luddite, every individual benefits by having the necessities of life available to them (food, water, etc) at a lower cost thanks to capital advancements (farming machinery, water pipelines, etc).

Exactly: a lower cost-of-living thanks to automation and innovation and more production = a healthier and longer life for everyone.

Why is this so difficult for some people to understand? A slow and managed de-flation is the best solution to this Great Recession.

More land, more water, more food, more medical-care, more energy, more help from governments, and more free-trade = the best way out of this Great Recession. Let the de-flation begin.