Man vs. Machine

First off, a great documentary about a great machine, a history making machine.

I just wish they had some good animation that showed how the machine worked. Perhaps the fact that I'm not very mechanically-inclined affected my incomprehension of the quick demo they showed in the film, I don't know!

Anyway, I just have this thing against people who say this new machine or this new technology has taken jobs away, or it has replaced man with a machine!

The printing presses replaced manual hand copying, and the photo typesetting replaced the mechanical, and maybe hologram books(or something like that?!) will replace that as well. The point is, someone else figured out a way to do your job in a better way, and succeded.

We can't blame China for losing our jobs. We should blame our lack of progress, and our inability to meet the "current" demand. If a Chinese factory can make product X for 20cents; to be sold at the dollar store, we should figure out a way of how to make it for 15cents. And not close our factory!

If we need to lower wages to meet goals, then lower wages. But, at least we'll have a population that is involved in real crafts and real jobs; crafts that will beget better crafts and more jobs. I mean real jobs, not the jobs that the majority of the population is employed to do nowadays(Insurance, finance, customer service and sales(of the mostly foreign-manufactured products).

Most of the Chinese/Indian/Brazilian population make less that a tenth of our average salaries, and yet it's not affecting their economical super power status.
Most of us don't "really" own anything; houses that are owned by banks for 30odd years, then rented from the government(property tax) for ever.
Credit cards that entrap us and pull us into the abyss that is debt.
And a constant bombardment of inflatedly priced superficial crap:
$400 million films and $17 movie tickets, $120/day per person at DisneyWorld(WTF?), etc., etc... All of it is Bull$h!t.

The mighty US dollar will sooner or later be replaced by the Chineese Yan as the hard currency of the world. As China, surely, will(sooner or later) demand Yan for their products(after most of the western world factories close). What then? ...They won't allow us to drug their population like last time(the opium wars), ...they have big guns now!


So, instead of us whining about the Chinese stealing our jobs(or a machine that took a man's job), let's figure out a better way to do our jobs(or a make a better machine than theirs), so we can meet "current" demands.









A genius amongst morons is just another moron.