Tag: conservative

Independent candidate feels the system is broken

Independent candidate feels the system is broken

Maria Lewans Swift Current resident and small business owner Maria Lewans is running as an independent candidate in the Cypress Hills-Grasslands federal riding.

She feels that society needs to change profoundly and the political parties in this federal election are not able to implement transformative change.

“We’re digging ourselves deeper into our problems instead of getting out,” she said. “I didn’t think any of the other parties were really addressing the situation. I don’t think re-arranging our taxes, giving tax breaks, filtering money here and there, is going to do anything. Our problems plaguing society are very deep-rooted and we really […]

Don’t Tax Robots (Yet)

Don’t Tax Robots (Yet)

A robot at science and technology commission of the Chamber of Deputies during a demonstration of technological innovation at the Chilean Congress in Valparaiso, Chile, October 2, 2019. While most of the Democratic presidential candidates were busy trying to come up with the most extreme proposals possible on health care, guns, and climate change, New York mayor Bill de Blasio earned his ill-fated campaign a brief flurry of media attention by endorsing an idea once backed by Bill Gates: tax robots to mitigate the reduction in human employment that they are expected to cause.

This is a bad idea in […]

Economic consequences of automation

LONDON — While Brexit captures the headlines in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, the silent march of automation continues. Most economists view this trend favourably: Technology, they say, may destroy jobs in the short run, but it creates new and better jobs in the longer term.

The destruction of jobs is clear and direct: A firm automates a conveyor belt, supermarket checkout, or delivery system, keeps one-tenth of the workforce as supervisors, and fires the rest. But what happens after that is far less obvious.

The standard economic argument is that workers affected by automation will initially lose their jobs, but […]

Mining employment returns to boom-time footing

Not quite deja vu all over again

That is a level not seen since the end of the original investment boom triggered by China’s compounding embrace of seaborne raw materials markets from 2005.

When that once-in-a-century expansion in mining sector capacity began local miners directly employed an estimated 113,000 people. By the time the boom exhausted itself in 2012, 274,000 Australians were employed by miners. As AMMA noted, through that hectic seven-year stretch, workforce demand in the mining business grew by 20 per cent annually.The resulting cost inflation – particularly in the heavy equipment, engineering and contract construction sectors – […]

Today’s BattleBot Competitor, Tomorrow’s Engineer

Today’s BattleBot Competitor, Tomorrow’s Engineer

By Hunter Chase, Reporter

A 250-pound machine created purely for destruction may sound like something from a science fiction movie, but it’s reality for five students from Palos Verdes. They designed and built a robot with solid steel armor that spins three blades at 200 miles an hour. Rancho Palos Verdes residents Sean Stassi and Trevor Heise were featured in the third season of BattleBots , a fighting robot reality series.

The show consists of robots competing in three-minute one-on-one bouts with the goal of destroying or disabling the opponent. If there is no knockout during the battle, a panel […]

Neo-Socialism and the Rise of the Machines

Neo-Socialism and the Rise of the Machines

Diego Rivera, “Man at the Crossroads” detail (Wikimedia Commons) Today’s emergent socialism is less an attack on liberalism than a wake-up call to mainstream politicians sleeping through the tech revolution.

Socialism hasn’t been as popular as it is today since the late 19 th and early 20 th century, when the Wobblies were a force to be reckoned with and public figures such as George Orwell, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Bertrand Russell identified as socialists. Today, a self-described socialist is currently a serious contender for President of the United States and more Americans under age 30 view have […]

We all get replaced

We all get replaced

Danville’s original iron foundry began in 1829 fabricating farm and kitchen tools. It lasted three years. Danville’s iron industry was ultimately snuffed out by the depression of 1873. Iron was only a 40-year run. That’s the nature of economies. Keelboats that steer downstream and pole upstream get replaced by steamboats. In 1811, a steamboat traveled from Pittsburgh to New Orleans in 14 days. Fine, until railroads. Fine, until auto assembly lines.

We all get replaced. Technologies invariably change. Coal plants close not from EPA regulations but from corporate decisions (cheaper, cleaner alternatives) and improved technologies like automation. The real question […]

Lure of the long-shot

Lure of the long-shot

A few days ago, the Washington Post ran a feature cleverly titled “Random Man Runs for President” quite literally describing Andrew Yang, one of the 20-something candidates running for the Presidential Elections of the United States in 2020—against one Donald Trump. Except he isn’t random anymore. His campaign is powered by young, neoliberal-leaning, meme-ready, predominantly online supporters calling themselves the ‘yang gang’. Pitching himself as the data guy, Yang hails modest success in business. Like Trump, he is an outsider but unlike him, he comes with no baggage, or public notoriety. And though his candidacy is a long-shot, in […]

America’s Finest Economists Have Been Needlessly Undermining Growth, Study Confirms

America’s Finest Economists Have Been Needlessly Undermining Growth, Study Confirms

This board could have been more decorated. For much of the past decade, America’s foremost economic thinkers have been struggling to resolve two “mysteries”:

1. Why was the prime-age labor-force participation rate (i.e., the percentage of workers ages 25 to 64 who have a job or want one) stuck so far below its precrisis level?

2. Why was wage growth tepid , even as the unemployment rate dropped near historic lows? Which is to say: If jobs were relatively plentiful, and available labor relatively scarce, then why weren’t workers feeling more emboldened to demand higher pay? Or, viewed from the other […]

This Lunatic Ten Hour Working Week Idea!

This Lunatic Ten Hour Working Week Idea!

Just when you thought you’d heard it all, along comes the Labour bigwigs backing an absolutely loony-tunes proposal for a ten hour working week.

PLEASE WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW:

Doesn’t it sound so attractive, no-one will work more than ten hours a week and we can save the environment from the climate emergency and have a much better work-life balance in the process.The numbers in the report by Philipp Frey for Autonomy all crunch out right in the spread sheets and the formulas all add up.What it seems to be saying is that, if the country is economically much […]